This paper highlights the strategies prepaid card issuers have adopted to meet the diverse needs of consumers.
Over the past decade, millions of American households have turned to prepaid cards to spend, save, and manage their money. Prepaid card issuers have adopted a number of strategies to meet the diverse needs of consumers and prepaid cards vary immensely across the industry. Such diversity is beneficial to consumers, provided that the overall quality of products is high and that providers continually strive to meet the needs of consumers.
Eighteen General Purpose Reloadable (GPR) cards are analyzed in this report. These cards collectively represent approximately 90% of the total GPR card marketplace and include the largest players in the industry, as well as a sampling of smaller programs with particularly innovative cards. To develop scores for the industry as a whole, these eighteen cards were assessed against the recommendations outlined in the Compass Guide to Prepaid. Quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis were employed to generate scores that accurately capture the quality of products in the prepaid card marketplace.