More than ever before, Our customers are ordering plastic cards with barcoding and/or magnetic stripes. That’s because this card feature is the key ingredient to managing a card balance, tracking people’s spending behaviors or ensuring they have secure access to whatever it is they need access to (a hotel room, a building, a certain type of equipment, etc.).

Choosing a barcode or a magnetic strip really depends on your internal systems, as well as what your needs are. But, if you’ve already decided a magnetic strip is the way to go, then you have another decision to make with your plastic card printing (which I also talked about in that post): low-coercivity (LoCo) vs. high-coercivity (HiCo).

Coercivity measures the level of strength a magnetic field needs to affect the data on the magnetic stripe. The higher the coercivity level of the stripe, the stronger the magnetic field has to be in order to change the data on the card. Therefore, if your magnetic stripe is HiCo, it’s less likely to have the encoding erased. However, HiCo stripes can be more expensive and aren’t always necessary. Below are the coercivity levels commonly used for each card type.

Low-Coercivity:
Hotel Key Card

High-Coercivity:
access badges
credentials
ID badges
key cards
debit/credit cards

Keep in mind, the best way to decide which type of coercivity to choose is to figure out how frequently the card will be used. Also, you should factor how important data erasure resistance is to you and those who will be using the plastic cards.