The concept of using prepaid credit cards for purchase is more recent than the concept of using a credit card for purchases. This process was described in 1887 by Edward Bellamy in his utopian novel Looking Backward. Bellamy used the term credit card eleven times in this novel.
The modern prepaid credit card is quite different than a credit card and was the successor of a variety of merchant credit schemes. It was first used in the 1920s, in the United States, specifically to sell fuel to a growing number of automobile owners. In 1938 several companies started to accept each other’s cards. Western Union had begun issuing charge cards to its frequent customers in 1921. Some charge cards were printed on paper card stock, but were easily counterfeited.
The Charga-Plate, developed in 1928, was an early predecessor to the prepaid credit card and as a credit card it was used in the U.S. from the 1930s to the late 1950s. It was a 2½” × 1¼” rectangle of sheet metal related to Addressograph and military dog tag systems. It was embossed with the customer’s name, city and state. It held a small paper card for a signature. In recording a purchase, the plate was laid into a recess in the imprinter, with a paper “charge slip” positioned on top of it. The record of the transaction included an impression of the embossed information, made by the imprinter pressing an inked ribbon against the charge slip. Charga-Plate was a trademark of Farrington Manufacturing Co. Charga-Plates were issued by large-scale merchants to their regular customers, much like department store credit cards of today. In some cases, the plates were kept in the issuing store rather than held by customers. When an authorized user made a purchase, a clerk retrieved the plate from the store’s files and then processed the purchase. Charga-Plates speeded back-office bookkeeping that was done manually in paper ledgers in each store, before computers.
In 1936, American Airlines and the Air Transport Association simplified the process even more with the advent of the Air Travel Card. They created a numbering scheme that identified the Issuer of card as well as the Customer account. This is the reason the modern UATP cards still start with the number 1. With an Air Travel Card passengers could “buy now, and pay later” for a ticket against their credit and receive a fifteen percent discount at any of the accepting airlines. By the 1940s, all of the major domestic airlines offered Air Travel Cards that could be used on 17 different airlines. By 1941 about half of the Airlines Revenues came through the Air Travel Card agreement. The Airlines had also started offering installment plans to lure new travelers into the air. In October 1948 the Air Travel Card become the first inter-nationally valid Charge Card within all members of the International Air Transport Association.
The concept of customers paying different merchants using the same card was expanded in 1950 by Ralph Schneider and Frank McNamara, founders of Diners Club, to consolidate multiple cards. The Diners Club, which was created partially through a merger with Dine and Sign, produced the first “general purpose” charge card, and required the entire bill to be paid with each statement. That was followed by Carte Blanche and in 1958 by American Express which created a worldwide prepaid credit cardnetwork (although these were initially charge cards that acquired prepaid credit card features after BankAmericard demonstrated the feasibility of the concept).
However, until 1958, no one had been able to create a working revolving credit financial instrument issued by a third-party bank that was generally accepted by a large number of merchants (as opposed to merchant-issued revolving cards accepted by only a few merchants). A dozen experiments by small American banks had been attempted (and had failed). In September 1958, Bank of America launched the BankAmericard in Fresno, California. BankAmericard became the first successful recognizably modern prepaid credit card(although it underwent a troubled gestation during which its creator resigned), and with its overseas affiliates, eventually evolved into the Visa system. In 1966, the ancestor of MasterCard was born when a group of California banks established Master Charge to compete with BankAmericard; it received a significant boost when Citibank merged its proprietary Everything Card (launched in 1967) into Master Charge in 1969.
Early credit cards in the U.S., of which BankAmericard was the most prominent example, were mass produced and mass mailed unsolicited to bank customers who were thought to be good credit risks. But, “They have been mailed off to unemployables, drunks, narcotics addicts and to compulsive debtors, a process President Johnson’s Special Assistant Betty Furness found very like ‘giving sugar to diabetics’.” These mass mailings were known as “drops” in banking terminology, and were outlawed in 1970 due to the financial chaos they caused, but not before 100 million credit cards had been dropped into the U.S. population. After 1970, only prepaid credit card applications could be sent unsolicited in mass mailings.
The fractured nature of the U.S. banking system under the Glass–Steagall Act meant that credit cards became an effective way for those who were traveling around the country to move their credit to places where they could not directly use their banking facilities. In 1966 Barclaycard in the UK launched the first prepaid credit cardoutside of the U.S.
There are now countless variations on the basic concept of revolving credit for individuals (as issued by banks and honored by a network of financial institutions), including organization-branded prepaid credit cards, corporate-user credit cards, store cards and so on.
Although credit cards reached very high adoption levels in the US, Canada and the UK in the mid twentieth century, many cultures were more cash-oriented, or developed alternative forms of cash-less payments, such as Carte bleue or the Eurocard (Germany, France, Switzerland, and others). In these places, adoption of credit cards was initially much slower. It took until the 1990s to reach anything like the percentage market-penetration levels achieved in the US, Canada, or UK. In some countries, acceptance still remains poor as the use of a prepaid credit cardsystem depends on the banking system being perceived as reliable. Japan remains a very cash oriented society, with prepaid credit cardadoption being limited to only the largest of merchants, although an alternative system based on RFIDs inside cellphones has seen some acceptance. Because of strict regulations regarding banking system overdrafts, some countries, France in particular, were much faster to develop and adopt chip-based credit cards which are now seen as major anti-fraud credit devices. Debit cards and online banking are used more widely than credit cards in some countries.
The design of the prepaid credit carditself has become a major selling point in recent years. The value of the card to the issuer is often related to the customer’s usage of the card, or to the customer’s financial worth. This has led to the rise of Co-Brand and Affinity cards – where the card design is related to the “affinity” (a university or professional society, for example) leading to higher card usage. In most cases a percentage of the value of the card is returned to the affinity group.
Collectible credit cards
A growing field of numismatics (study of money), or more specifically exonumia (study of money-like objects), prepaid credit card collectors and credit card collectors seek to collect various embodiments of credit from the now familiar plastic cards to older paper merchant cards, and even metal tokens that were accepted as merchant credit cards. Early credit cards were made of celluloid plastic, then metal and fiber, then paper, and are now mostly plastic.
How prepaid credit cards and credit cards work
Credit cards are issued by a prepaid credit cardissuer, such as a bank or credit union, after an account has been approved by the credit provider, after which cardholders can use it to make purchases at merchants accepting that card. Merchants often advertise which cards they accept by displaying acceptance marks – generally derived from logos – or may communicate this orally, as in “Credit cards are fine” (implicitly meaning “major brands”), “We take (brands X, Y, and Z)”, or “We don’t take credit cards”.
When a purchase is made, the prepaid credit carduser agrees to pay the card issuer. The cardholder indicates consent to pay by signing a receipt with a record of the card details and indicating the amount to be paid or by entering a personal identification number (PIN). Also, many merchants now accept verbal authorizations via telephone and electronic authorization using the Internet, known as a card not present transaction (CNP).
Electronic verification systems allow merchants to verify in a few seconds that the card is valid and the prepaid credit cardcustomer has sufficient credit to cover the purchase, allowing the verification to happen at time of purchase. The verification is performed using a prepaid credit cardpayment terminal or point-of-sale (POS) system with a communications link to the merchant’s acquiring bank. Data from the card is obtained from a magnetic stripe or chip on the card; the latter system is called Chip and PIN in the United Kingdom and Ireland, and is implemented as an EMV card.
For card not present transactions where the card is not shown (e.g., e-commerce, mail order, and telephone sales), merchants additionally verify that the customer is in physical possession of the card and is the authorized user by asking for additional information such as the security code printed on the back of the card, date of expiry, and billing address.
Each month, the prepaid credit carduser is sent a statement indicating the purchases undertaken with the card, any outstanding fees, and the total amount owed. After receiving the statement, the cardholder may dispute any charges that he or she thinks are incorrect (see 15 U.S.C. § 1643, which limits cardholder liability for unauthorized use of a prepaid credit cardto $50, and the Fair Credit Billing Act for details of the US regulations). Otherwise, the cardholder must pay a defined minimum proportion of the bill by a due date, or may choose to pay a higher amount up to the entire amount owed. The credit issuer charges interest on the amount owed if the balance is not paid in full (typically at a much higher rate than most other forms of debt). In addition, if the prepaid credit carduser fails to make at least the minimum payment by the due date, the issuer may impose a “late fee” and/or other penalties on the user. To help mitigate this, some financial institutions can arrange for automatic payments to be deducted from the user’s bank accounts, thus avoiding such penalties altogether as long as the cardholder has sufficient funds.