What value does a prepaid gift card retain when the company where it can be spent files for bankruptcy? A legal intern looks at the law and recent cases and offers advice to consumers.

Some consumers use prepaid cards like cash—others, in place of a bank account.

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...

This article discusses the various uses of stored-value cards and the different degrees of their use and acceptance four years after their introduction.

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...