TransCard Expands Product Line with Student Prepaid Card (March 25, 2013)
The growing student card market has a new entrant. Chattanooga, Tenn.-based processor and program manager TransCard is targeting banks that want to offer prepaid cards to college students with its newest reloadable prepaid product. The company’s announcement of its Student Prepaid Card comes just weeks after unveiling a prepaid card for banks to offer customers for use during travel.
The MasterCard-branded Student Prepaid Card can be loaded via direct deposit, bank account transfer or a secondary card. Features include online budgeting, real-time text alerts and a mobile app.
Part of TransCard’s Premier Select Suite of GPR prepaid products, the student card is available to TransCard’s partner financial institutions. In 2010, the company partnered with the American Bankers Association to launch the Community Bank Prepaid Program, a turnkey MasterCard prepaid platform for community banks, in an effort to eliminate the barriers to entry for small financial institutions that wish issue their own branded prepaid cards. By September 2012, 1 percent of all banks in the U.S. offered prepaid cards through the program
In January, TransCard struck a deal to acquire HQ Gift Cards, the nation’s largest program manager of mall-based prepaid and gift cards, in a bid to expand its product offerings. In November 2012, the company announced it was teaming with NFC technology provider DeviceFidelity to develop a white-label mobile wallet that will use microSD chips to overcome the current dearth of NFC-enabled mobile smartphones available in the U.S.
