Visa should promote this product, much more strongly, wherever it can.

I was watching a documentary on Netflix today. It was about consumer trends and how companies design products that we, as consumers, intentionally have to (and want to) replace with new ones every so often. At one point, the narrative got pretty heavy on what happens to these products after they die, when they just become junk.

The documentary is called “Buy Now” (recommended!), and one statement in particular stuck in my head, perhaps from a former adidas employee. To paraphrase: “If I had a magic wand and could rule the world for a day, I would make companies start thinking about the entire lifecycle of a product, including what happens to it after purchase and after death.

Couldn’t agree more.

I started thinking about what this looks like in the fintech industry. My first instinct was to think: it’s not bad, we’re not producing junk, we’re in a virtual world. After a while, however, the thought faded. I remembered the flagship product of companies like Visa and Mastercard. The payment card. A product often referred to simply as “plastic”. In fact, the terms “plastic” and “card” are often used synonymously in the industry, as if they were the same thing.

And, of course, virtual cards are becoming increasingly popular around the world, with many companies issuing their physical cards in materials other than typical plastic. But let’s not kid ourselves – plastic is the most common option on the market, most banks offer such products. Ba! Often, the plastic card is even a complement to the virtual card, a kind of premium product, something that is treated as an additional option, for the more demanding customers.

And at this point, I remembered a service that is already on the market, but for some reason is far too quiet. About the Visa Flexible Credential service, a service that allows you to link multiple bank accounts to a single payment card. About the service that was implemented last month by companies like Affirm and Liv Digital Bank.

I don’t know if Mastercard, American Express and other card companies have a similar service.

If they do, great. If not, they should launch such a service as soon as possible.

And we, as card users, can only hope that card issuers and bank accounts will want to connect to it. And by extension, that one day we will all wake up with the knowledge that we have a single “plastic” that is linked to all our bank accounts and allows us to pay easily from any of them.