Economics Focus on Finance

Economics Focus on Finance
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Economics Focus on Finance
According to Jeannette N. Bennett, general-purpose reloadable prepaid cards are most growing in the United State market and other parts in the world. Whenever one goes to malls, food shops, supermarkets and many other business centers, one cannot lack large racks of prepaid cards on the entry displayed smartly to get one his attention. The trend of marketing and advertising prepaid cards in the recent world can be compared to the use of pay phones in communication before the invention of cell phones. The pay phones were telephone booths that could be placed in a certain strategic point such as a corner, and before one made a call, he or she needed to insert a certain amount of coins that will determine how long the caller will take. The call will be ended if the caller did not have enough coins. There were some disadvantages however for the pay phone unlike with general-purpose reloadable prepaid cards, when calling into international platform, the caller had to communicate to the operators. Since the coins were physically stored in the phone, vandalism was high and the coins could be lost due to that.
The introduction of the prepaid card according to the writer in the year of 1980s in the United State saved the telephone companies a lot of lost revenues due to vandalism and abrupt cut of calls that had made customers prefer other methods of communication. The idea of prepaid cards quickly spread out to other business industries such as retail shops, food shops and to other private merchant specific cards. Most businesses that adopted the use of prepaid debt cards privately labelled the cards with their business names and connected them to other international money transaction firms such as visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover and PayPal. These connections made it easy to use the prepaid cards widely, their usage increases and they were used even at the ATMs with the visa logos and MasterCard sign CITATION Pre15 \l 1033 (Guide, 2015) .
In 1990s, the prepaid card technology inspired the government and the United State adopted the use of these cards in replacement of paper-based food stamps with the EBIT (electronic benefit transfer) prepaid cards. The electronic benefit transfer prepaid cards had inspired a growth of an empire in the prepaid card industry as most merchant businesses accepted the cards in their stores. Today the world consists of different types of many prepaid cards even some that are reloadable. The trend of consumers spending habits as improved the usage of the prepaid cards popularity. Among the most preferred card in the industry is the general-purpose reloadable prepaid card (GPR), the prepaid card had an annual growth rate percentage...