Why Use Prepaid Cards

While broad-based consumer prepaid cards generally offer consumers an alternative payment method, corporate needs and interests are different. Companies are not so much interested in developing alternative payment methods but improving administrative practices to save time and money.

Commercial prepaid programmes can offer a number of advantages to a company, its employees and customers.

Beyond the administrative efficiencies, innovative use of prepaid applications can help strengthen a company’s brand and image through prepaid solutions that reinforce security, ease of use and broad acceptance among employees, business customers and consumers.

Examining the requirements of large companies has particular relevance in considering the commercial opportunities for prepaid products. Prepaid solutions address the efficiency concerns of large companies and, more importantly, will be considered as part of their overall payment solution requirements. Large companies are increasingly working with their commercial banking partners to create operational efficiencies through payments technologies. We can expect that companies will add prepaid requirements to their tender solicitations for broader payment solutions. Prepaid applications will be added to requirements that now include corporate Travel and Entertainment (TE) cards, lodged accounts and purchasing cards. These companies will continue an important trend toward “one-stop shopping” to meet their payment product needs.

Understanding this trend is critical in terms of meeting the needs of large customers – customers that can generate the recurring large volumes under long-term contracts that produce business annuity.

With the growth and benefits to be derived through prepaid cards, companies will most certainly come to expect that their commercial banking relationships include a prepaid card component among the various card and payment services to be supported. Domestic operations of multinational companies, in Europe and around the world, will be subject to the increasing centralisation of payment options and sourcing.

Another important underlying factor in Europe is the advanced state of the chip card environment. Many prepaid solutions, or sponsors of prepaid solutions, will seek integration with other payment options. The multi-application and variable capabilities of chip card technology will help create a receptive infrastructure environment for prepaid – an environment far more advanced in Europe than in other parts of the world.

These trends, coupled with increasing pressures for greater efficiency and the need to build strong employee and customer relationships, will continue to encourage the growth of commercial prepaid programmes.

While the range of prepaid applications is considerable, there are clear factors that will drive commercial adoption of prepaid card applications. These factors differ from consumer payments in that they focus primarily on administrative efficiencies and, secondly, on strengthening company relationships among employees and customers.

At Airmax we aim respond to the particular needs of businesses, and learn to integrate these solutions with the broader demands of integrated payment solutions, we hope to be best positioned to realise the very substantial opportunities in this important area of growth for the payments industry.