Adding Your Business Card in Apple Wallet
For techies and engineers at heart with big curiosity and a bit of time to spare
3 seconds read 🏃🏻♂️
Many people want to have digital business card, because they are eco-friendly, always accessible, and give a fresh professional impression. Plus when you pull it out from Apple Wallet, it looks quite cool. 😎
3 minutes read 🚶🏻♂️
Believe it or not, it is still an uncomfortable feeling for many people, when they are not able to give their business card while meeting with others in professional context.
I was one of them. 😅
Starting my career as a Software Engineer in France, for many years I used to collect my own name cards as I grew in my career. I must admit, looking at my own career reflected in those name cards has its own satisfaction.
Software Engineer → Team Manager → […] → Head of Market Unit → […]
It’s some kind of internal validation that we are somehow on track and going on the right direction. I was wrong - more on this on another post.
Then there is also the external expectation that goes with exchanging name cards. There are ways to do it according to the culture, there are DOs and DON’Ts.
But above all - for those who have been in many networking events - sooner or later you will notice that people judge each other the moment they exchange name cards, intentionally or unintentionally. You and I included. 😒
They look at the company name and the fancy title, then the subconscious mind starts to think whether the other person is worth their time. It's sad, but it's the reality.
However, despite all of that superficial layer, business card is still here to stay for many of us, because it immediately gives context to the conversation that is happening around the exchange.
What you can do is to level up and move away from the traditional business card when you feel ready. There are many ways that you can choose from:
Make one of those NFC cards so you can just keep one business card with you. There are few solution providers that you can find easily in the internet.
Those NFC cards typically have QR Code too, because somehow NFC card is not always reliable when being used to tap to mobile phone as the receiver.
Simply use the built-in QR Code from one of your favourite apps : LinkedIn, WhatsApp, Telegram, Instagram, etc.
Create your professional card in your Contacts app and share it when needed.
Many other creative ways that people have come up with.
When you look for these alternatives out there, you will find out soon enough that the solutions ranges from free, all the way to a hardware solution (i.e., NFC card). The latter is typically combined with other added values such as landing page, variety of templates with fancy design to choose from, etc. - but most likely slapped with a monthly subscription model from the service providers. Fair enough. 🙂
In this post I'm sharing one method that I chose to implement by myself, which initially came from the idea to have just one NFC business card - something that I had experienced before. I was tinkering with that idea and was ready to order a set of blank NFC card to personalise and test.
Until I finally came to the conclusion to forego the additional form factor and just keeping it all within my iPhone - something that I carry with me all the time.
And … what is the best way to do it, if not with the Apple Wallet? 😎
For Android users, everything that I'm writing here is applicable, with the exception for the final step which is to add into the relevant wallet in your Android phone.
3x techie read 👨🏻💻
Before we go further and break down the components and the steps to achieve them, let's remind ourselves of the objectives here:
I want people to get the essentials: name, phone number, email address.
I also want them to check other info: title, company name, website, address, LinkedIn profile, and brief introduction about my professional raison d'etre.
So I need container(s) that I can use to keep all of those information. One option is a contact info that is already standardised as vCard (*.vcf) format. Another option is to have a good old web landing page with all of that information.
I ended-up combining both. I'm a techie, it's stronger than me. 😂
Another reason why I was driven to create my own digital card was due to my multiple roles back in 2024. I officially held four roles that I could share publicly - three of them were fractional roles:
Founder & Director of Shannon Pte. Ltd.
Head of Sales for Uppsala Security
Chief of Technology Officer for Boga Group
Tech Whisperer & Partner for N9 Offices
So it was much more convenient for me to keep all of them neatly in my Apple Wallet, and depending on the occasion and context, I would share the suitable business card to the person that I was meeting.
Now time to break down the components.
Four landing pages in my website - one for each role.
Four QR Codes that point to each of those landing pages.
Four vCard(s) that can be downloaded from the landing page.
A mobile app to help you add a new card in Apple Wallet.
You realise that the first component could also be your LinkedIn page, or Author page on Amazon, etc. and that you can create any QR code to point to that page for the second component. The third component is optional. Actually, you also can export your vCard into a single QR Code that contains all the information, that is yet another option.
I designed the simple user experience where I would choose a suitable card from the Apple Wallet that contains the QR Code. The other person would then scan and be redirected to the corresponding landing pages.
Since I already have a website for my company (https://ayks.io), I just created another CMS collection to host my various business cards, then design a simple landing page template to achieve the objectives that I shared earlier. They look like this:
The final touch is to add the "Save Contact" feature where basically the pre-initialised vCard will be downloaded into the person's phone to give the option to save it into their phone.
In order to do this, I needed to export the right contact card as *.vcf file and save it into a Google Drive with public access. Then prepared a URL that will trigger the download process.
As for the step to add those cards into the Apple Wallet, I used a free app that works like a charm, it’s called Pass4Wallet and you can find it in the Apple Store. Kudos to their developers and check out their websites in case you need their services.
Note: this post is not a sponsored post. 😄
That's it! That's how you add a professional looking digital card in your Apple Wallet.
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