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What 2025 holds for payments remains to be seen. Decreasing interest rates may fuel larger spending and comfort with revolving credit, but some businesses have begun limiting their acceptance of cards or passing fees along to customers, which could drive decreased use. Couple those developments with a shifting regulatory environment, and the future of card payments gets a bit murky.
But by continuing to keep a watchful eye on our own trends, we can uncover new strategies to better deploy our card programs. The following three metrics can help community banks enhance their card program market performance in 2025:
Debit card volume. Debit card volumes tend to complement credit card ones, but they also can signal when a campaign or incentive you have in place is working.
Case in point: Our bank has increased its debit card revenue from 27% of non-interest income in 2017, to 45% in 2024. We provide a high school debit card program where use of the card links to donations to local high schools—and the principals get competitive! Giving back to the community through this program has benefited the schools, but it’s also enhanced our activation rates and activity.
Credit card activation rates. Activation rates are key to building transactional volume and customer engagement. By monitoring your inactive accounts and working to transform them into active status, you are enabling organic growth for your card revenue.
Interest rates and business BIN use. As they say, the devil is in the details. When interest rates shift, ensure your credit card rates move with them to remain profitable and competitive in the current environment. Additionally, it’s best to use business BINs for small business customers, because business transactions processed through them earn more interchange revenue.
These metrics just scratch the surface of what community banks can learn when they take a closer look at data. Fortunately, as ICBA Payments clients, we have analytics at our disposal to track our growth trends. The Automated Card Expert (ACE), a portfolio analysis tool exclusively from ICBA Payments, is available to all FIS credit clients at no cost. It provides tools to run comprehensive financial analyses of your bank’s credit card portfolio, and you also can schedule a consultation with ICBA Payments experts to have them offer recommendations based on your activity.
Card payments are not going anywhere: The latest Federal Reserve Payments Study showed a great increase in non-cash transactions. So, make sure you’re setting your program up for success by conferring with your dedicated ICBA Payments relationship manager. As ICBA Payments heads into our 40th year in 2025, we do so with an eye toward the future, because as ICBA Payments President and CEO Jacob Eisen has shared, we’re in a new era for payments.