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Like many industries, the open-loop prepaid card segment of payments has absorbed the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, but the results may not be as harsh as for some other segments in payments. That’s one assessment from Mercator Advisory Group’s 17th Annual U.S. Open-Loop Prepaid Cards Market Forecast 2020-2024 Part II report.
Released Thursday, the report predicts that U.S. open loop prepaid loads will grow at 4.1% through 2024, topping $466.2 billion. That bests the projection in last year’s report, in which Mercator forecasted 2% growth through 2023.
The pandemic’s impact will be felt, too, Mercator says.
“The open-loop prepaid market is highly fragmented,” says Theodore Iacobuzio, Mercator’s vice president and managing director for research. “While the impact of the virus is felt by each of the segments, each segment is going to react in a different way. For instance, campus is taking a nose dive. On the other hand, government disbursements will continue to grow.”
Whether these changes will be permanent is uncertain. “It is safe to say that some categories of open-loop prepaid cards will change in much the same way that the overall economy is going to change, and is currently changing, under the impact of the virus,” the Mercator statement says.
