Digital Business Cards for Corporate Companies

In a company of eight, business cards are stationery. Somebody orders a box, everybody takes a handful, and the logo is right because one person chose it.

In a company of eight hundred, they are a control problem. Cards get ordered by region, by division, by whoever has a budget code and a deadline, and within two years there are four versions of the logo in circulation, three phone numbers for a switchboard that moved, and a set of job titles HR has never seen. Nobody decided this. It is just what happens when a physical object is printed by many people over a long time.

This is what changes when a corporate moves to digital business cards, and the questions procurement will ask before it signs anything.

Branding stops being a request

The usual method for keeping cards on-brand is asking people nicely and checking at the proof stage. It works until somebody is in a hurry.

On a team account, an administrator sets the logo, company name, website, address and social profiles once, and then chooses which of those an employee may change. A locked field is not a rule in a brand manual. The editor will not let it be typed, and the server refuses the write even if somebody opens the browser tools and tries to send it anyway.

What stays personal is the part that should be: name, photograph, direct line, cell number. What the company standardises is the part that carries the brand. A job title can go either way, which matters more than it sounds - locking it means the company decides what somebody's title is, rather than the person deciding for themselves.

Corporates are not one company

Most large South African businesses are a group. A holding company over several operating companies, each with its own name, its own registration, often its own board, and sometimes branding that shares nothing but a shareholder.

Cardtly has three levels for this: a group at the top, companies beneath it, and departments inside those. The group is billed once, from one seat pool, on one invoice, while each operating company keeps its own logo, colours and slice of the web address.

Each company chooses whether to wear the group look or its own, and the group owner can lock that choice. Departments inherit from their own company rather than from the group, so a subsidiary stays internally consistent even when it looks nothing like its parent. Department heads can tighten the rules for their own people without being given control of the whole group.

Onboarding and offboarding stop being print jobs

The week somebody starts, a corporate has to get them a laptop, an email address, a building card and, eventually, business cards. The cards are always last because they involve an outside supplier and a minimum order quantity.

A digital card is issued the same day, from the same dashboard, by the same person who does the rest of it. A whole intake can be imported from a spreadsheet in one go rather than typed in one at a time.

Offboarding is the half nobody plans for and the half that matters. When an employee leaves a company with printed cards, several hundred of those cards are in other people's wallets, and they keep working. The number on them still rings. A digital card is archived and it is offline immediately, everywhere, including the copy somebody saved to their phone months ago.

The leads belong to the company

This is the argument that usually lands in a boardroom, because it is the one with money attached.

When a salesperson at a large company leaves, the network leaves too. The contacts are in their phone, the conversations are in their WhatsApp, and the pile of cards they collected at three years of conferences is in their drawer. The company paid for every one of those trips.

Cards on a team account capture contacts into a shared list the company owns. Somebody scanning a paper card into the app, somebody exchanging details at a conference, somebody filling in a lead form on a card - all of it lands somewhere the company can still see it after that employee has gone.

What procurement will ask

Corporate buying is a different exercise to a small business signing up, and the questions arrive in a predictable order.

Question	Answer
Who controls what staff can put on a card?	The company admin, field by field, enforced on the server
What happens when someone leaves?	Card archived and offline immediately, seat reassigned
Who owns the contacts collected?	The company, in a shared list in the team dashboard
Can we run several brands?	Yes, group over companies over departments
Can we add people in bulk?	Yes, spreadsheet import
Can it talk to our systems?	Yes, through a team API key
How is it billed?	R97 per card a month in rand, one invoice for the group
What about POPIA?	See the questions below

Self-serve covers 2 to 20 cards. Above twenty, the sizing and the invoicing are arranged directly, which is usually what a corporate wants anyway.

POPIA is a procurement question, not a footnote

A business card holds personal information, so a card platform processes personal information on the company's behalf, which makes it an operator under POPIA. That is not alarming, but it does mean somebody in legal will want answers before the rollout.

The questions worth asking any vendor are where the data is hosted, who the sub-processors are, how one customer's data is separated from another's, whether you can export everything yourself, and what happens to it when you leave. We wrote those out in full, with what a good answer looks like, in digital business cards and POPIA.

What employees actually get

None of the control matters if the thing is unpleasant to use, because people quietly stop sharing it.

An employee gets a card that opens as a normal web page for whoever receives it, with no app to download on either side. They share it by tap, by QR code, or as a link over WhatsApp or email. They pick from 16 designed templates, within whatever the company has locked. They can carry up to ten custom links and a gallery of up to ten photographs, and they can see how often their own card was opened and what people tapped.

The recipient saves the details to their phone with one tap, which is the whole point, and is the part a paper card has never managed.

How a rollout usually goes

1. Set the group and the companies. Get the structure right before anybody is invited, because moving people afterwards is more work than doing it once.
2. Brand each company and lock the fields. Decide deliberately what an employee may change. Most corporates lock logo, company name, website, address and socials, and leave name, photograph and direct line open.
3. Pilot one department. Twenty people for a month tells you more than a policy document. Sales is the usual choice because they will complain fastest if something is wrong.
4. Import the rest. A spreadsheet per company, rather than a form per person.
5. Decide about NFC. The QR code and the link need no hardware. Physical NFC cards are optional at R150 once-off with your logo on our layout, or R200 designed around your brand, plus R100 shipping per order in South Africa.

Every signup gets 7 days of the full product with no credit card required, which is enough to run the pilot before anybody signs a purchase order. See how team accounts work or read the comparison of what business cards cost a sales team.