This conference, sponsored by the Payment Cards Center, brought together prepaid card industry leaders and regulators to discuss how various prepaid-card systems work and the ways in which different state and federal laws can affect them. The conference featured sessions on bank- and...

Prepaid cards, also commonly referred to as stored-value cards, are typically credit card-sized pieces of plastic that contain or represent an amount of pre-loaded value. They include a wide range of payment products, such as gift cards, payroll cards, teen cards, and travel cards. Despite...

On March 30, 2005, the Payment Cards Center hosted a workshop led by Sherrie L.W. Rhine and Sabrina Su of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Office of Regional and Community Affairs to discuss the relevance of stored-value cards to “unbanked” or underserved consumers. The authors...

Summary: On January 13, 2005, the Payment Cards Center of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia sponsored a workshop led by Gary Palmer, chief operating officer and co-founder of WildCard Systems, to examine the developing market for prepaid card products. Palmer described several distinct...

Presented by Charles I. Plosser, President and Chief Executive Officer, Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, 4th Annual Simon New York City Conference Reform at a Crossroads: Economic Transformation in the Year Ahead

This paper examines how instances of identity theft that are sufficiently severe to induce consumers to place an extended fraud alert in their credit reports affect their risk scores, delinquencies, and other credit bureau variables on impact and thereafter. We show that for many consumers these...

On October 14, 2004, the Payment Cards Center hosted a workshop led by Professor Mark Budnitz of Georgia State University School of Law. Budnitz, the author of four books and many Law Review articles on consumer payments, described how the current regime of consumer payment regulation and...

This is the third in a series of three papers that examines the laws, regulations, and voluntary industry practices that may aid consumers who contest an electronic transaction because of error, fraud, or merchant dispute. The first two papers describe the complex web of protections available to...

Banks and credit card companies lobbied Congress for several years to amend the Bankruptcy Code because of an increasing number of bankruptcy filings1 and evidence that debtors were abusing the existing code. On April 20, 2005, President Bush signed the Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer...

The National Bank Act (NBA), the 140- year-old statute that led to the creation of nationally chartered banks, has likely been one of the most influential forces in the formation and development of the U.S. credit card industry. The NBA gives nationally chartered banks a wide range of powers and...