payment, partnership, payI am a engineer and have this concept of pre-paid bank cards, similar to Monzo.
How can I make the pre-paid card (with chip) work in regular chip and pin in the regular shops and also make it work in ATM.
In other word who do I need to contact to make the card recognizable in the regular payment terminals.
With some research it looks like I have to partner with Visa or Master Card.
I would like to know what are the procedure to make this happen? Or even a guideline so I can futher research on it.
As far as I know, Visa and Mastercard only work with banks. Once you open your own (legal) bank, you can set up a pre-paid card business.
Where I am, prepaid bank cards are common, and they come in two “flavours” - ones that only ever have one balance loaded, and ones that can be topped up. The former tend to be presented as gift cards, while cards of the latter type are more varied.
They share one issue, which is that I’ve yet to see one that’s universally accepted in the way traditional debit and credit cards are.
For one class of cards, that’s not a commercial issue but a practical one. There are a lot of card reading devices and card merchants out there, and lots of those (it turns out) really didn’t envisage that the day would come when cards like this would proliferate, and built software that works with all main bank cards but may stumble even though the back end systems are in place. But if I wanted to get into that market quickly, I would approach one of the retail banks that offers third party branded prepaid card services.
There’s another class of cards where the approach has been to build relationships with payees (including utilities etc) and to roll out proprietary terminals in partnership with retailers. That may sound pretty clumsy, but it’s been very successful in its niche - and of course bypassing existing infrastructure enabled innovation and avoidance of the rent extracted from financial transactions by established bank networks.
In a sense, ApplePay is a venture of this kind, bypassing cards altogether. Here consumer pressure to accept ApplePay has been a factor driving adoption. So I wonder if there’s a way for a startup to ride on those coat-tails. I’m guessing that terminals supporting ApplePay have been built with the assumption that they’ll need to accept a variety of non-traditional bank service providers in future.
Coming back to your question, then, if you want to have a card that ticks every banking box, you need a partner who is a bank, or you need to sell your tech to one of the big networks. But if you want to be an innovator in prepaid cards, and are prepared to tick fewer boxes at least for a time, the opportunity may never have been better.
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