Hyundai Card has launched the NAVER Hyundai Card Edition3, a co-branded bank card line developed in collaboration with CEKAI, a New York-Tokyo inventive collective recognized for anamorphic 3D billboard work for Nike, BMW and Fendi. The launch marks a deliberate departure from standard card aesthetics, making use of ideas from large-format digital show design to a bodily cost instrument.
The venture started in mid-2025 when Hyundai Card and CEKAI began exploring how to reframe the cardboard as a medium for movement somewhat than a static graphic floor. Rather than designing in two dimensions and including a way of depth afterwards, the groups developed the visible idea and its dynamic qualities concurrently. Korean expertise group NAVER, whose model belongings anchor the cardboard vary, offered overarching design path all through.
The three plates
After greater than 100 design drafts, the collaboration produced three card variants. Plus is positioned round the advantages of NAVER Plus Membership. Neo makes use of color gradients and geometric graphics to venture what the discharge describes as futuristic vitality. Logo Metal, the premium variant, makes use of movement graphic methods to make the NAVER emblem seem to shift relying on the viewing angle.
Hyundai Card’s Design Lab dealt with the interpretation from display idea to manufactured product. Laser processing was used to render tremendous particle results on the steel plate, whereas specialist movies had been utilized to the 2 plastic playing cards to amplify the graphic motion. The manufacturing course of required shut co-ordination between the inventive and technical groups to protect the movement phantasm on the scale and materials constraints of a cost card.
Kota Iguchi, CEKAI’s inventive director and movement designer, stated: “Credit cards exist as physical plates, but we can easily imagine a future where they evolve into digital displays or take on entirely different forms. This project was incredibly exciting because of those diverse possibilities.”
Market and strategic context
The announcement is primarily a product design story somewhat than a monetary or regulatory occasion, but it surely sits inside a broader sample value noting. Card issuers in aggressive shopper markets have invested closely in bodily card differentiation as a model and retention instrument for the reason that mid-2010s. Metal playing cards, specifically, have turn out to be a signalling machine throughout premium and super-premium segments globally, utilized by issuers starting from American Express to a rising variety of neobanks looking for to venture credibility by tangible product design.
For Hyundai Card particularly, design is a acknowledged strategic pillar somewhat than a advertising and marketing afterthought. The firm holds the only real South Korean issuer partnership for Apple Pay, is the unique issuer of American Express Centurion card designs out there, and in October 2024 signed a contract to license its proprietary AI platform, UNIVERSE, to Sumitomo Mitsui Card Company in Japan. That licensing deal represented a notable shift: a card issuer exporting expertise somewhat than solely working a home portfolio.
The NAVER co-brand is itself a strategically vital relationship. NAVER is South Korea’s dominant search and commerce platform, and the Edition3 card connects Hyundai Card’s issuing capabilities to one of many nation’s largest loyalty and membership ecosystems. Whether the design funding interprets into measurable acquisition or spend carry will not be addressed within the launch; the business metrics behind co-branded card programmes of this kind are not often disclosed at launch.
The broader query for the trade is how lengthy bodily card design stays a significant differentiator as contactless and digital pockets funds cut back how typically cardholders bodily deal with or show their card. For now, issuers present little signal of retreating from premium supplies and elaborate finishes, suggesting the card-as-object continues to carry model weight at the same time as its practical position within the cost move diminishes.
AI stage 1 of 5: written by Darlyn Ho; AI helped with tone, construction or wording; edited and signed off by Mark Walker, Editorial Director. What the levels mean
