Prepaid Cards

With Christmas day looming, retailers that issue digital gift cards, along with the vendors that supply them, are expecting a rush of last-minute purchases from shoppers who don’t have time to buy plastic cards. With e-cards flying out to the handsets of recipients at parties and in homes and offices, …

The prepaid card industry is marching to new frontiers as November heads toward a close. Intuit Inc. on Tuesday is expected to launch a prepaid Visa card for new merchants in its GoPayment smart-phone-based service, and the Federal Reserve Board approved prepaid card program manager Green Dot Corp.’s plan to …

  With the holiday-shopping season set to kick off on Friday, a startup in San Diego has launched a Web site that lets consumers buy gift cards at 10% of face value. The remaining balance, the company says, comes due only when the cards are redeemed. The site, from Moola …

  Open-fare payments for public transportation got a big boost when the Chicago Transit Authority announced it had awarded a $454 million, 12-year contract to Cubic Transportation Systems to build and maintain a payment system that accepts contactless cards. The CTA, which provides about 500 million rides a year, thus …

  With the holiday season weeks away, more major retailers are now offering so-called virtual gift cards. But few make the experience of buying, sending, and redeeming the digital payment products easy or pleasant, according to a report issued this week. Some 59 of the 100 largest online merchants, ranked …

  CashStar Inc. plans early next year to roll out a mobile app that will let consumers tap unredeemed rewards points held at banks to buy digital gift cards from major merchants. The app will also feature location-based alerts to let users know when they are near a merchant issuer. …

  A startup called Openbucks this week introduced a service that lets consumers use merchants’ gift cards to buy goods online from other merchants. The Redwood City, Calif.-based company, which has been working for five months with gift cards issued by the Subway sandwich-shop chain, claims its “gift card payment …

  Closed-loop prepaid cards held their own in 2010, growing by 13% in loads to $261.2 billion from $230.3 billion in 2009, according to Mercator Advisory Group Inc.’s newly released industry study. In fact, the closed-loop market, which while bigger in loads but slower growing than the newer, general-purpose or …

  Nearly nine months after introducing a rule requiring recipients of Social Security and certain other benefits to switch from checks to electronic deposit, the U.S. Treasury Department says the number of check recipients has dipped below 9 million for the first time in decades. The agency is now in …

  The wild trading on stock markets worldwide over the past week has left U.S. payments-industry shares battered and bruised, though they made a mild recovery Thursday morning. Worst hit are shares of prepaid card companies, though networks, processors, and money-transfer providers are feeling the pain too. A Digital Transactions …