Thin flexible cards (TFCs) are used to automate the controls for access to goods or services such as mass transit, highway toll systems, car parks, vouchers and stored value.

For these applications, data can be written and/or read by machines using various recording techniques: magnetic stripe, optical character recognition (OCR), bar code, etc.

This part of ISO/IEC 15457 specifies the magnetic stripe and encoding characteristics of thin flexible cards at two points in the card’s life cycle:

Guidance concerning the storage and usage of finished cards (including magnetic stripe cards) under various environmental conditions is given in ISO/IEC 15457-1.