How to payment-enable online visitors quickly
We often get asked by websites and portal operators: “could I offer a prepaid Visa card to my un-banked visitors?”
Until now, we would answer with an offer to link their pages to a prepaid card enrollment site like UPsideCard.
Now the team at Plastyc, headed by Justin Surman, has created aWeb Services API which allows businesses to display and process prepaid Visa card enrollment forms inside their own pages, without sending their visitors somewhere else.
The Card Enrollment & Account Management API running on the enrollment servers:
- accepts the user data captured in the forms
- validates the data for obvious formatting or entry errors
- passes the user data to a card processing platform to perform the Customer Identification Process (“CPI”) required by law
- returns an Identifier for the new cardholder and the ACH routing and account numbers corresponding to the card being newly created
This allows the site hosting the user enrollment form to know immediately if a visitor is eligible for a prepaid re-loadable Visa card, and, if positive, to know which bank transfer number is allocated to the imminent cardholder.
Of course, the actual card will take a few days to reach the cardholder by postal mail. Nevertheless, the card account can be immediately loaded with funds via:
- the ACH network, for example for tax refunds and unemployment benefits
- Green Dot MoneyPaks which can be purchased in cash at 50,000 locations across the US
even before the card has reached the card holder and been activated.
The Web Service API also offers several methods covering simple prepaid card account management tasks:
- Retrieving the complete list of cardholders enrolled via the EnrollCardholder method
- Retrieving the details of the cardholder account
- Retrieving a list of transactions from a cardholder account, during a set interval of dates
- Allowing a cardholder to share money with another cardholder
- Letting a cardholder suspend his/her card in case of suspected loss of theft
View the SlideShare above for a more detailed overview.
