Good advice from Charlotte Stallings on My Fox Houston about reloadable prepaid cards:
Pretty Popular Prepaid Payment Cards: MyFoxHOUSTON.com
The Federal Reserve today issued the final rules on the Durbin Amendment, and it’s an ultimate win for retailers, although I predict some battles to come from the banking industry and consumers before the dust settles.
The Amendment, part of the sweeping Dodd-Frank financial overhaul legislation, allows the Federal Reserve to put limits on the interchange fees that merchants pay banks when you swipe your debit card at their cash registers.
Today, those fees are ranging between 1% and 2% of the amount you purchase and have added up to $16.2 billion that merchants paid in 2010. As of October 1, 2011, the planned effective date for the new rule, those fees will be a maximum of 21 
cents plus 0.05%, nearly 48% percent lower than before for a typical transaction of $40.
Lower fees sound like a good thing, assuming the savings are passed on to consumers and assuming that the banks can still afford to run the networks that make debit cards work safely and reliably.
If they can’t, consumers will see new fees tacked on to their bank debit cards and will respond by moving to lower fee alternatives. That, in turn, will prompt the banks to innovate their financial products while being mindful of not letting hidden fees get out of hand, for fear of sparking the regulatory backlash cycle all over again. And in the end, I predict consumers will gain fair, simpler, more transparent banking options, and retailers won’t be left holding the bill. But it will take a few tries to get there.
For background on hidden interchange fees, read Why You Should Care About Hidden Interchange Fees in 2011
For the details of today’s ruling, read the Fed memo posted by PYMNTS.com
Disclosure: Plastyc, a company that offers prepaid card services (prepaid cards are a sub-category of debit cards)is not directly affected by the proposed interchange rules, which only apply to prepaid card issuers with assets of $10 billion or more.
Below is an excellent video created by Bank 2.0 author Brett King.
This is exactly what we are seeing at Plastyc: strivers provide the core of the growth among the under-banked, not fresh immigrants.
Their motivations for being prepaid card accountholders?
Visa estimates that strivers are about 48MM in the US. A majority of them is Caucasian, 30% African American, and 7% Hispanics.
Read the article by Zachary Ehrlich in MyBankTracker
A relatively new site called GetDebit provides information about “non-credit” card products.
In the US, debit cards that are linked to a bank account, and prepaid cards that are not, get both categorized as “debit” products and have that word printed on the front of the card. So, GetDebit actually deals with both debit cards and prepaid cards. (In Europe, prepaid cards do not have the word “debit” printed on them, and have other differences like not being necessarily embossed).
GetDebit stands out in its editorial approach: they do write articles about specific products and services without seeking advertising dollars from the companies behind them. This is worth noting in a world where infomercials are almost impossible to distinguish from genuine articles.
Granted, their business model is indeed to advertise products and place the highest bidders at the top of the pages, but they also mention products and do in-depth analysis without asking for ad dollars.
Evidently, we are praising them because they wrote a piece about the API that our company, Plastyc, released last week. And we have never paid them any advertising dollars.
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:
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:
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:
View the SlideShare above for a more detailed overview.
