Simple is often held up as a paradigmatic digital bank. After all, it was one of the first digital-only banking concerns in the world.

Which is why it is somewhat surprising to learn that the banking venture, now a subsidiary of BBVA, does not use its rich data for something as straightforward as card reissuance.

Simple was founded in 2009 and started beta-ing its service in 2012, which means many of the debit cards of its original customers, often testers of the service, are now expiring. (A flak at Simple gave a “woo!” for this milestone.)

Clearly, since a portion of those original customers were trying Simple, there are a few dormant accounts in the batch — and by “dormant” I mean have not used Simple at all in at least a year and likely have little if any money in their Simple account.

Now that the expiration is drawing nigh, Simple needs to send these lax customers new debit cards (apparently without EMV, parenthetically). It stands to reason that Simple would want to customize its reissuance correspondence to those disengaged customers. Maybe a “how about using it?” kind of message.

But Simple does not. A company spokeswoman wrote me that all reissued cards get the same mail piece, even if the card being replaced was lost. This despite the, er, simplicity of the data sort (last activity > Aug 12 2014) that would allow for a more customized message.

Instead, Simple uses the tagline “It’s Good to Be Back” for all card reissuance. Here’s the explanation for why:

Reissuing cards is standard bank work. We’ve just opted to keep up our creativity with card packaging and cut out the garbage filler text in favor of something that’s more “Simple,” so, what you experience is “It’s Good To Be Back” — that’s as if the card is talking, telling the recipient, our customer, how good it is to be back in his/her possession, you know, because the card is being replaced.

Uh, OK.

The thing is, no financial institution, Simple included, gets unlimited customer “touches.” The upshot is that despite the richness of available data — never mind the brand perceptions — it is what you do with that data that counts.