Prepaid Cards

By John Stewart @DTPaymentNews Gift card marketers have dominated the holiday season and other gift-giving occasions in recent years, but now a card is coming to thousands of those checkout-lane racks that will let budding investors buy or give away shares of stock in a favorite company.

By Jim Daly@DTPaymentNews Dollars loaded onto closed-loop gift cards fell 9% in 2015, according to new research from Mercator Advisory Group Inc. But one major prepaid card issuer, Dunkin’ Brands Group Inc., franchisor of Dunkin’ Donuts and Baskin Robbins stores, reports that its DD Perks loyalty program now has more …

• Prepaid card program manager Green Dot Corp. has expanded its Instant Pay disbursement program with on-demand car-hailing service Uber to enable real-time payment of driver pay to almost any Discover, MasterCard, or Visa debit card, using MasterCard Inc.’s MasterCard Send service. Up to now, Instant Pay driver disbursements were …

• Prepaid card provider Green Dot Corp. reported that second-quarter net income more than doubled from a year earlier to $7.78 million on a 2% increase in operating revenues to $173.5 million. While Green Dot’s active card count of 4.28 million was down 11% from a year earlier, purchase volume …

Dollar volume on Discover Financial Services’ Pulse electronic funds transfer network declined 9% in the second quarter, but that was an improvement from the first quarter’s 15% plunge and the bottom is in sight, Discover said on Tuesday. Meanwhile, the impact of grocery stores’ reluctance to accept credit cards for …

• ATM network operator Cardtronics plc announced organizational changes that include chief financial officer Edward H. West taking on the additional role of chief operations officer and North American Business Group president David Dove leaving the company later this year. Jonathan Simpson-Dent, who had been managing director of Cardtronics Europe, …

Citigroup Inc. on Wednesday announced it has struck a definitive agreement to sell its institutional Prepaid Card Services unit to Munich, Germany-based Wirecard AG. The deal is significant in that it will give Europe’s second-largest payment processor a toehold in the U.S., and it marks the retreat by another big …

• Prepaid card provider Green Dot Corp. appointed William I. Jacobs, who joined its board of directors in April, as board chairman. The chairman spot had been held by CEO Steve Streit, but the company, which recently had a proxy fight, is separating the roles. Jacobs currently is chairman of …

Forecasters have long predicted that the U.S. payments market’s move to EMV chip cards for in-person transactions will drive criminals into e-commerce fraud. Now data is emerging to show the nuances these fraudsters are exploiting, and how the rise in online fraud is hardly limited to the U.S. market. In …

Two long-time members of Green Dot Corp.’s board of directors who were up for re-election suddenly resigned Sunday, just ahead of the company’s contested annual shareholder meeting Monday that potentially could lead to the ouster of company founder and chief executive Steven W. Streit. The Pasadena, Calif.-based prepaid card provider …