ALIVE Platform Bulletin #18

Posted on 21. May 2021 by Lukas Vit

Dear issuer,

welcome to the ALIVE Platform bulletin which regularly informs you about nearest upcoming changes.

This time, we will inform you about NCDB tweaks and the preview of a new feature in DM which will be surely useful for you and your partners.

NCDB

New placeholders for Card Designer

To offer more possibilities when printing plastic cards and generating digital cards, some new placeholders were added into Card Designer in NCDB.

For some specific card designs, there was a need to print cardholder first and last name separately. Therefore, the previously used placeholder “CARDHOLER_NAME” changed its name to “CARDHOLDER_FULL_NAME” (no change in functionality, just a change of name) and two new placeholders were added. These are:

CARDHOLDER_FIRST_NAME
CARDHOLDER_LAST_NAME

Also, we created two new placeholders for pre-nominal and post-nominal academic degrees:

CARDHOLDER_PRE-NOMINAL_ACADEMIC_DEGREE
CARDHOLDER_POST-NOMINAL_ACADEMIC_DEGREE

These placeholders can be useful for example for academic cobrands.

All new placeholders behave the same way as the old ones. From your side, no change of your currently defined card designs in NCDB is needed!

Changes in issued cards import (external card issuers)

One of many ways how to issue cards within the ALIVE Platform is through External Issuers. Just a quick note to remind – external card issuers are such issuers (big universities or banks for example) who issue/print cards completely on their side and just report these issued cards into NCDB. The cards can be reported through the API or through imported XLSX file. The XLSX import faced some changes in order to meet the needs for better data quality and also to offer more possibilities. The changes are listed below:

Changed attribute VALID -> ACTIVE

One of mandatory columns in imported XLSX file is called “Card State”. This column defines if the imported or updated card should be active or inactive. Up to now, the allowed values have been “VALID” and “VOIDED” (for cancelled cards). However, the value “VALID” was confusing because it didn’t refer to the card validity (ie. when the validity starts and when the card is going to expire), and therefore we changed it to “ACTIVE” meaning just the opposite to the cancelled card. Cancelled card can’t be used by the user and is useful for situations when it’s damaged, lost, stolen or the cardholder simply returned the card to its issuer for some reason (not studying any more etc.). You’ll find more information under the question mark icon in NCDB when making the import or in the LMS course mentioned below.

Thank you very much for sharing this information to external issuers in your market who import their cards by themselves using the XLSX files. This change does not affect SOAP API integrations.

Also, please notify the external issuers to use for the import the sample XLSX file that can be downloaded from NCDB, from the step when they do the import (the sample file is hidden under the question mark icon).

Better quality of imported data

Data quality is the alpha and the omega of every information system and the ALIVE Platform is no exception. In accord with this statement, some new data quality checks were implemented into the logic of imported XLSX file processing.

In the imported file, there mustn’t be any duplicities in both e-mail addresses and phone numbers. These quality checks ensure that external issuers cannot for example import 1000 cards with the same e-mail address, which historically caused many consecutive issues. Consider the unique email is the main key for Marketing Manager for example and it can bring big trouble in case the same e-mail is assigned to more cardholders. Correct and unique e-mail addresses will be also essential for the upcoming Profile Manager and Client Zone modules.
Cardholders’ Date of Birth, which has been optional until now, was made mandatory. Also in this case, the purpose of this change is to have better data within the ALIVE Platform and should not cause any issues for you as the date of birth is already a mandatory attribute on both plastic and digital cards. In case you don’t have dates of birth, you for example cannot make any “age based” filtering in Marketing Manager and apply legal related features in case the cardholder is a child younger than an age defined in the market configuration (according to GDPR or other national regulations).

Import of cards with photos

A new feature allows the external issuers to attach photos directly to the imported XLSX file which was not possible up to now. This feature works as follows:

Within the imported file, there is a new column called “Photo File”. This column is designed to contain text field indicating the name of the photo, including the format suffix (e.g. .jpg).
Together with the XLSX file, it is possible to import also a ZIP archive with photos. These photos must have exactly the same names as defined in the XLSX file.
When the cards are being imported, the system takes all photo names from the XLSX file and tries to find matching photos in the ZIP file. In case some files are not found, the import cannot be successful.
Please take into account that the imported photos should be in JPG image format, 450 x 540 pixels, portrait orientation. NCDB expects that their format and quality meet the card photo quality standards. In this upload process there is no automated quality check mechanism implemented.

Please take into consideration that importing photos through the XLSX files is an operation requiring a lot of performance and the photos upload and processing takes some time. Therefore it is not recommended to import more than a few hundreds of cards with photos at once. For large amounts of cards, the recommended way is to use the API for external issuers or split imported data into more smaller batches.

For more information about external issuers, feel free to have a look at our LMS course How to work with external card issuers – ALIVE Platform LMS.

Anonymized cards/cardholders

In NCDB administration, the visual interpretation of cards and cardholders whose data have already been anonymized has been updated. Once a card and its cardholder have been anonymized, it is not possible to edit the record, however in the past the UX was not made well. From now you will be able to clearly see the anonymized records in the lists of cards and cardholders as they are grayed. Moreover, in the list of cards you’ll be also able to filter all anonymized cards using a new card status filter option. In the detail or edit page of a card or cardholder you can newly see a notification bar informing you that the record has been anonymized and all action buttons for edit or delete the records are newly hidden. When using APIs, for anonymized records a new error messages with specific information about anonymized records have been also implemented so the API integrators will receive more precise information about the data.

An example of new API response when trying to update an anonymized entity through the external card issuer’s SOAP API:

<env:Reason>

<env:Text xml:lang="en">Card is already anonymized.</env:Text>

</env:Reason>

Changed strings in EN language

We did a lot of tweaks in the English text strings within the whole NCDB to better describe the features, input fields or notifications or simply meet a new naming and text formatting standards which we are starting to implement. These changes don’t have any impact on the functionality, they were made just for better user experience and understanding of NCDB features.

In case you feel some English labels in NCDB (but also in other modules) are confusing, please let us know and we can discuss together how to improve the wording. Your feedback is highly appreciated!

Other NCDB improvements

direct support of CSS code in the detail of Card Issuers
new font for Batch Card Printing for better print quality
if an NCDB order is divided into more smaller orders, notes are automatically assigned to all of them
UX improvements of Cardholders’s Bulk Update
NCDB “RETURNED” status for cards issued and then returned through CI module

Discount Manager – Competitions module

A new feature of “Competitions” was added into Discount Manager. It is a first part of a big set of new features which we are working hard on in relation to the Profile Manager and Client Zone modules. You can take a look at it and send us your first feedback so we can make it together working absolutely great. Competitions will be displayed to the signed in customers – cardholders in the upcoming mobile app developed by GTS and new website WordPress plugins (both communicated as a new Client Zone module).

You can find the competitions in main vertical menu of the Discount Manager. New competitions may be added from the discount provider detail page. Please take a look and play around with this feature only in the test environment.

Launch of new markets

ALIVE Platform for Morocco

We are happy to announce that the ALIVE Platform for Morocco has been just launched. Welcome on board, we are looking forward to a longlasting and fruitful cooperation, Christophe.

ALIVE Platform for Argentina

We are also more than happy to start the onboarding process with Argentina that is supposed to start using the ALIVE Platform soon.