Paybefore Recognizes Prepaid Standouts

Paybefore recently announced its 2016 prepaid awards, which highlight a number of great innovations in the prepaid space. While the prepaid space has faced regulatory headwinds over the past year, merchant and consumer interest in the product offerings continue to grow. Here are a few of the standouts that caught my eye. These bring solutions to very real problems (unlike the erstwhile Kardashian card and its ilk, which are the types of offerings that draw regulator attention to the prepaid space for all the wrong reasons).

• Karmic Labs was named both a Rising Star for its Dash Prepaid MasterCard and Best Mobile App (in conjunction with FIS for their joint BizNow/Dash offering). Karmic’s prepaid offering addresses the challenges of business expense reimbursements. Its mobile app removes the need for employees to keep track of all those pesky little receipts while providing companies an efficient means of control and oversight of employee expenditures.
• NuData Security was named as a Judges’ Choice winner for its approach to remote channel fraud detection, which brings to bear a combination of behavioral analytics, cognitive biometrics, and device analysis.
• MasterCard factored prominently in the rapidly growing government and health benefits delivery categories, with its capabilities instrumental in five of the seven winning solutions. These are two more great prepaid use cases, as they provide the opportunity to pull checks out of the systems and transition to electronic payments.

Especially as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau encourages financial institutions to develop reduced-risk product offerings to foster financial inclusion, the role of prepaid in the financial ecosystem is more important than ever. Here’s hoping the left hand talks to the right at the CFPB and the prepaid guidelines that are expected to come out of the CFPB in Spring 2016 continue fostering innovation in the space.

Voting for Best in Category is open to the industry until February 29, so go check out the candidates and cast your vote!