The future for prepaid cards

Abstract

The prepaid industry is becoming a truly worldwide market. It is well established in the US, but is now receiving much more attention globally. Prepaid cards were launched in the mid 1990s in the US and the first programme in Europe can be traced back to 1999. Originally introduced as a more efficient replacement for paper gift certificates, prepaid cards now represent a broad payment category that spans a wide range of applications. This new worldwide market offers huge opportunities. For example, MasterCard has forecast over US$600 billion will be spent globally on prepaid by 2010.