Within the context of the Trans Awareness Week, a one-week celebration leading up to Transgender Day of Remembrance on November 20th, 2022, Nickel is proud to announce that its customers will soon have access to Mastercard’s True Name feature. This will allow cardholders to use their chosen first name on their payment card, rather than their assigned name, helping to ease a pain point for the transgender and non-binary communities.
Nickel and Mastercard share the belief that everyone should have access to payments methods that represent their true identity, thus removing a barrier for transgender and non-binary people by allowing them to safely and easily use their true name for daily purchases.
True Name is a feature that lets cardholders with participating banks use their true first name on their card without requiring a legal name change.
All Nickel customers who wish to, will be able to add their chosen names on their My Nickel, Nickel Chrome and Nickel Metal cards without having to provide supporting documents. This option will be available online: in just a few clicks, while ordering a personal card, you can use this optional feature to add your true name on your card free of charge.
The True Name feature will be available for Nickel customers in France and Spain as from January 2023. Nickel will extend True Name to all its Belgian and Portuguese clients by 2nd quarter 2023.
Marie Degrand-Guillaud, Deputy CEO of Nickel: “Since its inception in 2014, Nickel is: “a bank account for all” and inclusion is our company’s purpose. Beyond financial and economic inclusion, we believe it is essential to address gender inclusion to ensure that our transgender and/or non-binary customers feel accepted and included. This starts with being able to display the name they most identify with when they make a purchase with their Mastercard cards.”
Geoffroy Seghetti, VP Marketing and Communications Mastercard - Western Europe: “We are pleased to see Nickel partner with Mastercard to make True Name™ mainstream and enable transgender and non-binary people the access that everyone else enjoys, with their true identity and most importantly make their daily lives easier without fear of discrimination. We share with NICKEL the values of inclusion and equity, and the fight against all forms of discrimination.”
Elisa Koubi, co-president of Inter-LGBT: "We are delighted to see Nickel join this initiative, allowing for greater inclusion of transgender and non-binary people and which aligns with the 2016 recommendation of the Defender of Rights to French banks to take into account the request of the customers’ use of their preferred name. This is an important step, which we hope will inspire other banking institutions to take up the issue to offer quick, transparent and accessible procedures, based on self-determination of all concerned."
