Much like designer shoes and exclusive watches, the premium payment card has entered the realm of luxury goods for many consumers.

The high-end of premium cards – those such as American Express’ Platinum and JPMorgan Chase’s Sapphire Reserve – has migrated to metal for greater weight, designed to express a holder’s affluence and unique identity.

Card vendors have further responded to the trend with other materials, including glass, ceramics and cards with embedded LEDs that glow during a transaction.

JPMorgan Chase’s Sapphire card portfolio had a record year in 2025, spokesperson Elizabeth Janis said Jan. 8 in an email, citing November comments by Bori Cox, the bank’s financial chief for consumer and community banking. 

The Sapphire Reserve card – which Chase revamped last year with a higher $795 fee and additional perks – “surpassed its prior full-year acquisition record” by the end of the third quarter of 2025, Janis said. JPMorgan Chase has added ten million card accounts annually since 2020, Cox said.

JPMorgan declined to disclose data detailing the mix of its premium metal and traditional payment cards. Amex representatives did not respond to questions about that bank’s card mix.

Conveying status

Heavier metal cards represent a status symbol, said Megan Anthony, director of pre-sales and design at card maker CPI Card Group, noting issuers’ loyalty programs and perks surrounding premium cards. CPI, based in Littleton, Colorado, makes metal, recycled plastic and other types of payment cards.

“Those days are gone where you get the card in the mail and you put it in the wallet, and the only time that you engage with that card is when you're pulling it out at the point of sale,” she said in a December interview.

Premium cards usually offer perks such as early access to buy concert tickets, benefits at specific venues like sporting events and entry to airport lounges.

Amex introduced its newest platinum card, made of stainless steel, in September with an $895 annual fee and a mirrored finish. Last year, the trading platform Robinhood Markets introduced a 10-carat solid gold credit card, weighing in at 36 grams. Both cards have become the subjects of dozens of social media and YouTube videos posted by consumers featuring their unboxing, presentation and public use.

In one case, American Express and Delta Air Lines repurposed metal from two retired Boeing 747 jumbo jets to create cards they issued in 2022 and 2024. A Delta spokesperson declined to reveal how many cards were produced or if the company plans future editions.

Amex will continue to introduce metal and other specialty cards because “our card members love them,” a bank spokesperson said last week in an email. Amex had about 500,000 requests in three weeks after introducing the new Platinum card, the spokesperson said.

Metal card makers have seen robust interest from banks and fintechs seeking new customers who want to flash unique, innovative designs when they pay, Benchmark equity analyst Mark Palmer said in an interview last month.

At the same time, metal credit cards have dispersed from high net worth people to a wider demographic known as “mass affluent,” or those with incomes above the general U.S. population, he said.

“The groups the banks are pursuing is expanding simply because these individuals categorized as mass affluent still have attractive lifetime values in terms of the revenue profiles that they offer,” Palmer said.

The industry’s trade group, the International Card Manufacturers Association, doesn’t track statistics on metal card production relative to other cards, said a spokesperson for the association, based in East Windsor, New Jersey.

Cardmakers have seen “a profound shift in how consumers perceive their payment cards,” said Eric Baumgartner, senior vice president of North American payment services for IDEMIA Secure Transactions, a card producer that is part of Paris-based IDEMIA Group.  

Premium cards bestow “a sense of status and individuality,” Baumgartner wrote last month in an email. “A card is no longer just a functional tool, it has become a personal object that reflects identity, lifestyle and values.”

Niche market leaders

The largest maker of metal cards, New Jersey-based CompoSecure, holds around 75% of that specific market. About 70% of its sales are from four customers, with American Express and JPMorgan Chase, the largest metal card issuers, as the top two, according to a CompoSecure November securities filing. 

“The metal card business is not growing extremely fast but it’s growing … and that appears to be stable,” Palmer said, citing annual growth of “high single digits and low double digits.”

In November, CompoSecure announced a merger with Husky Technologies, a Canadian-based maker of molded plastics for consumer goods, auto parts and medical devices that was sold by Platinum Equity Advisors, a Los Angeles private equity firm. The deal, expected to close this month, will see the companies remain operationally separate with their own management teams.

CompoSecure and Husky are both niche market leaders and the merger will reduce concentration risk, analysts at Fitch Ratings wrote in a Jan. 5 research note.

The card vendor will see ongoing growth in metal cards “due to product innovation, technology enhancements, and broader market adoption,” the Fitch analysts said in an email Friday from a company spokesperson. “The aesthetic appeal and brand value signaled by metal cards have shown attractive ROI for card issuers.”

Today, many of the largest banks are engaged in an arms race to become consumers’ top-of-wallet card choice. That trend has spread to a new generation of financial technology firms, Palmer said. 

In addition to Robinhood, the crypto exchange Coinbase Global and neobank Chime Financial have issued metal cards, with the latter introducing a 16-gram metal card last year. 

“While digital wallets and virtual cards are growing, we continue to see the physical card as an important part of members’ financial lives — both functionally and emotionally,” Cheryl Della Rosa, Chime’s card product operations manager, said in an emailed statement.

The competitive arms race in metal payment cards has emerged alongside the global rise of digital wallets and new virtual card options. And while mobile devices stand to gain more ground in payments in coming years, physical cards will enjoy widespread relevance for many years to come owing to consumers’ preferences, contend some in the industry. 

“I think the rumors of its demise have been much exaggerated,” CompoSecure CEO Jon Wilk said in a December interview.

Banks will keep issuing physical cards, even at the plastic end of the materials spectrum, because it helps them maintain their customer relationships, Wilk said. If they don’t, “somebody is sitting between them and their customer, either Apple or Samsung or Google,” he noted. “That’s not in the bank’s interest.”

Physical cards will also retain their relevance for a more practical reason, said Anthony, the CPI Card executive. “You lose your phone or your phone dies — what’s your backup payment method?”

A black pioneer

Premium cards trace their history to one of the industry’s most exclusive slices of metal, American Express’s invitation-only Centurion, widely known as the “Black Card” for its color. Five years after the card’s 1999 debut in plastic, Amex switched the $5,000-per-year card to titanium with CompoSecure.

Payment cards enjoyed a fresh boom in the 2010s as all manner of loyalty programs – from airlines to hotels to major merchants – began issuing ever-more-exotic cards, many of them with innovative materials.

“That’s when you really started to see the cards take hold in the zeitgeist of what was going on in society at the time,” Wilk said. “The business really started to expand and grow.”

The number of payment cards circulating globally has nearly doubled since 2015, to 18.1 billion last year, but yearly growth rates have slowed since 2021, according to Nilson Report data CompoSecure cited in an August investor presentation. 

Despite the heavy marketing around issuers’ premium cards and amenities over the past decade, metal cards hold only about 1% share of the global payment card market, CompoSecure said.

About 83% of consumers expressed interest in having a metal card, with an even higher percentage (91%) among people aged 18 to 37, according to a 2024 IDEMIA survey of 3,100 adults in a dozen countries, including the U.S., split evenly between men and women.

“The actual act of pulling a card out of one’s physical wallet and handing it to a waiter … is a much more enduring source of satisfaction for consumers than some had believed,” said Palmer, calling himself “a walking case study” for how physical and virtual cards coexist.

“I have Apple Pay and use it more online,” he said. “In a restaurant or a store, I’m taking out my Amex card.”