Question: how many types of bank cards are there

title: Payment card
text: Originally charge account identification was paper - based . In 1959 American Express was the first charge card operator to issue embossed plastic cards which enabled cards to be manually imprinted for processing , making processing faster and reducing transcription errors . Other credit card issuers followed suit . The information typically embossed are the bank card number , card expiry date and cardholder 's name . Though the imprinting method has been predominantly superseded by the magnetic stripe and then by the integrated chip , cards continue to be embossed in case a transaction needs to be processed manually . Under manual processing , cardholder verification was by the cardholder signing the payment voucher after which the merchant would check the signature against the cardholder 's signature on the back of the card . Cards conform to the ISO / IEC 7810 ID - 1 standard , ISO / IEC 7811 on embossing , and the ISO / IEC 7812 card numbering standard .