Today, prepaid cards are used in dozens of payment applications. To examine the most recent developments, the Payment Cards Center of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia hosted a workshop on August 22, 2011. Leading the workshop was Tim Walsh, president and chief executive officer of Ready...

This paper uses data from the 2008 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice to discuss the adoption, use, and discarding of various common payment instruments. Using a nationally representative sample of individual-level data, it presents evidence in unparalleled detail about how consumers use...

It's tough being a business correspondent (BC) to banks in India. In a survey of India's leading BCs by Microsave, a financial inclusion consultancy, about 70% of BCs reported that they currently either do not meet costs or operate at a loss.The impetus behind this model is the RBI's financial...

Start-up firm PayPerks has developed a financial capability and rewards platform that combines online education with sweepstakes-based incentives. PayPerks' initial emphasis has been on improving the understanding and use of prepaid cards among individuals with little prior experience using...

Despite the introduction of new technology and new ways to make payments, the Survey of Consumer Payment Choice (SCPC) finds that consumer payment behavior has remained stable over the past decade. In the 10 years of the survey, debit cards, cash, and credit cards consistently have been the most...

To examine the adequacy of existing efforts to prevent, manage and mitigate data breaches and other fraud in card-based payment systems, the authors conducted 17 interviews of various payment industry participants in 2009. This article documents the insights gained from the interviews, which...

This article examines the governance structure of retail payments in the United States, provides an overview of payment fraud, and discusses in depth the liability frameworks for fraud involving specific payment methods. It also presents a series of recommendations that describe how the public...

Using transaction data from a US consumer payments diary, we revisit the credit card debt puzzle—a scenario in which consumers revolve credit card debt while also keeping liquid assets as bank account deposits. This scenario is very common: 42 percent of consumers in our sample were...

This paper uses data from the 2008 Survey of Consumer Payment Choice to discuss the adoption, use, and discarding of various common payment instruments. Using a nationally representative sample of individual-level data, it presents evidence in unparalleled detail about how consumers use...

This paper reviews recent developments in online and mobile banking in the United States that provide bank account holders with low-cost interfaces to manage account-to-account electronic money transfers. The paper analyzes the emerging decentralized market in which A2A money transfers are...