Citizens launches Private Client card with feature for visually impaired

Citizens Financial Group is offering a credit card for its wealth management customers that also features a notched edge to help people with visual impairments identify their cards by touch.

Citizens is the first U.S. issuer to offer the feature, called Mastercard Touch Card; other Touch Card issuers include Santander in Mexico, Bpost Bank in Belgium, Swedbank in Sweden and Ajman Bank in the United Arab Emirates.

Touch Card uses a different notch for each account type — square for credit, round for debit, triangle for prepaid — to allow users to detect which card they're using by running a finger along the edge. The Citizens Private Client World Elite Mastercard is also made of metal, to further distinguish its feel.

The card offers 2% cash back, rebates for TSA Pre-Check and Global Entry, airport lounge access, and Mastercard Priceless Experiences. The card has a $195 annual fee, which is rebated for Private Client checking customers, according to Citizens.  

The Touch Card system is more widely applicable than braille, since many people who could benefit from Touch Card don't know how to read braille, according to Linda Kirkpatrick, Mastercard's president for North America, who spoke in a presentation at Mastercard's tech hub in New York this week.

Touch Card was developed with help from the Royal National Institute of Blind People, according to Bunita Sawhney, Mastercard's executive vice president of U.S. financial institutions, who described the product in a presentation at American Banker's Payments Forum this month.

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"The most astonishing thing was that some of our financial institution partners said, 'Hey, I don't want to just do this for our blind and partially sighted community members. I want to do this for all of our consumers as an act of inclusive solidarity with the entire community,'" Sawhney said. 

Citizens plans to add the Touch Card feature to more of its products in the coming months, according to Brendan Coughlin, vice chairman and head of consumer banking at Citizens, who also spoke at Mastercard's tech hub event.

"The full plan is to have this capability across all of our debit and credit cards … for all clients, all segments, to have the same experience," Coughlin said.

Kate Fitzgerald contributed reporting for this story.