Harnessing the Prepaid Market Growth with New Processing Platform Features

According to Mercator Advisory Group, the prepaid market will continue to grow – in 2012, roughly 12 million Americans used a prepaid card at least once a month and collectively loaded $65 billion to their accounts – double the amount loaded just three years prior. Those figures rose to 23 million users loading $76.7 billion in 2014.  Mercator Advisory Group projects $343 billion loaded to prepaid cards in 2018.

Additionally, according to ICBA, Independent Community Bankers of America, while overall growth of prepaid cards is surging, largely due to the emergence of non-bank competition, community banks have yet to offer prepaid cards on a large scale. About half (48 percent) of community banks offer some sort of prepaid product, and those banks offer gift (43 percent), travel (24 percent), general-purpose reloadable (12 percent), and payroll cards (2 percent). ICBA anticipates an uptick in community banks’ participation due to overall growth of the market.

One of the stimuluses for increasing the overall growth is providing “easy to use and sell “prepaid solutions in the market. These types of special features provided by CoreCard and designed for community banks and credit unions include:

• The multiple card sales with receipt feature is an intuitive business user interface that allows for multiple card sales for the same purchaser, with varying load amounts, on the same function screen. This feature eliminates the archaic methodology of ‘re-entering’ purchaser details per card sale, thus creating improved service and greater marketability.

• The reseller hierarchy feature is a multi-tier hierarchy which allows efficient operation for sellers, re-sellers and program managers or card programs. Hierarchy can be set up using a business interface, therefore making it equally accessible to business users and system administrators.

• The floating teller/user support across multiple bank branches feature supports staffing and operational needs of bank and credit union branches without losing the integrity and tracking of transaction by branch. Any agent can be assigned to any branch via a business interface.