COPECTO’s TIMBERCARD Black Release: A Strategy for Surviving Payment Card Market Pain

Wood card manufacturer COPECTO recently announced its first sustainable wooden card, the TIMBERCARD Black, as an alternative to plastic payment cards. In early scale deployment since 2024, the TIMBERCARD is already available in various banks and credit unions in Germany. The newest iteration, the TIMBERCARD Black, is made from maple wood, sporting a deep black satin finish, and is marketed as a premium card product.

The TIMBERCARD comes at an opportune time in the market. There have been some challenges in the traditional payment card market, and COPECTO is looking to position its products as a differentiated premium solution, helping pull additional value out of an extremely commoditized market. Symptomatic of the pain in the market currently are several issues:

• Macroeconomic Headwinds: There is fierce competition from low-cost Asian vendors to the traditional incumbents.
• Extended Expiry Dates Lengthening Replacement Cycles: Countries such as Malaysia are extending the expiry date of cards from 5 to 7 years, with others likely to follow. With replacement rates being the core of the market, this slashes shipment forecasts.
• Durability: Replacement shipments are further hit by the reduced wear and tear, which again reduces the potential replacement opportunity.  Better materials and printing techniques mean plastic cards last longer, in turn reducing the need for voluntary replacement.
• Only Replacing Active Cards: India started only re-issuing cards that were actively used, rather than all expired cards, which impacted the market further in terms of demand, and other countries may follow suit and adopt a similar strategy in the near future.

The payment cards market is searching for added value propositions to maintain relevance and revenues. Sustainability emerges as a core focus, alongside heightened customer experience and exclusivity. Metal cards have managed to carve out a successful position in the premium market by baking against these concerns.

Many issuers are looking at wooden payment cards as a similar solution, but the material is inherently at odds with existing values—particularly regarding printing quality and thus the ability to impart a brand experience.

There is a further challenge in the realistic sustainability credentials, with consumers increasingly aware of greenwashing and demanding well-backed claims.

COPECTO is doing a few key things well to make this market pivot a success:

• Embracing the wood, instead of trying to fight it by eschewing poorly replicated printing techniques for a more minimal look and feel.
• This unique, proprietary technology maximizes genuine sustainability by educating users about greenwashing and going beyond simple wood inclusion to emphasize the use of biodegradable adhesives.
• Straddling the sustainability and luxury markets, emphasizing the lifestyle value of the timber card to expand the available customer pool from the constrained sustainability niche. Sustainability is a uniquely important aspect, but COPECTO’s messaging heavily emphasizes the premium brand experience, and thus aligns itself with banks’ and fintech’s corporate and commercial goals outside of its social responsibility department.

There are additional avenues that COPECTO could explore to grow its business. It could consider scaling via licensing and Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) partnerships. By providing its Intellectual Property (IP), process know-how, and Quality Assurance (QA), it could leverage the capacity and issuer access of its rivals. It could also consider working with Swiss Wood Solutions to drive down the cost per card body to drive volume commitments, thereby reassuring large issues about capacity. Other markets are also open to it, such as access, loyalty, and membership cards, where margins can be higher, broadening its Total Addressable Market (TAM).

Today, COPECTO has a credible though niche upside in the plastic card market, which will guarantee some success in premium, Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG)-driven segments. However, if it wants to expand more significantly into the mainstream, it will need to consider scaling through partnerships and driving costs down more aggressively.