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Post by Markus on Jul 4, 2022 15:35:30 GMT
Profound Question Demands Profound Music
Who decided the shape and size of credit cards etc? The banks or wallet makers?!?!?!?
What is your profound question for our time?
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Post by oh oooh on Jul 4, 2022 15:39:30 GMT
They're all exactly the same shape and size, aren't they?
hm
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rayge
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Post by rayge on Jul 4, 2022 15:46:15 GMT
It was the makers of the cards and readers.
'All credit cards are 3.37 inches or 85.6 millimeters wide and 2.125 inches or 53.98 mm high. There is a standard credit card size for all cards because it is much more convenient for merchants to interact with them. If cards came in all different sizes, stores and service providers would need to have tons of different card readers to make sure each one could fit into a machine for payment processing.
Fortunately, credit card issuers didn’t need to come together and just agree on the size of cards, as this likely would have been a confusing and difficult process. Instead, organizations such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) set guidelines. There are 162 member countries in the ISO, and ISO/IEC 7810#ID-1 established the guidelines member countries must adhere to for credit card dimensions.
That means that not only is there a standard credit card size for cards issued in the U.S., but also that cards issued across the world are all sized the same.'
Why they chose that particular precise size, I don't know, but I'm guessing it was an engineering fix, or borrowed from another technology, in the first place, and then everyone copied it. And I'm of an age to remember cards being introduced, and there was a fair lag before wallets and purses had special compartments for them. Before then, it was notes, coins, and maybe stamps or in really fancy ones driving licences, but that was it.
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