New Prepaid Rewards Debit Card Launching
You love points. You love rewards. You love doing anything possible to earn those bonuses. But, you might have less than stellar credit or you might have applied (like some people I know) for 12 credit cards this year so far (seriously Brad, slow down).
Prepaid debit cards have been around for a while, but a prepaid REWARDS debit card has been hard to come by, and if they do show up, then their existence is short lived. For those of you who were around long enough to know about CVS, Vanilla, Bluebird, and PayPal debit cards, you’ll know what I’m talking about.
Coffee and Credit?!
Yesterday on the Starbucks earning call a new credit card offering was announced. Starbucks and Chase are going to be partnering to offer a new credit card in the next couple of months. The release says this:
The next major application of this new technology platform will enable the launch of financial services products in the US in conjunction with Chase. We are pleased to announce that our first product with Chase to be launched this winter will be a co-branded Visa credit card, enabling customers to receive Starbucks Rewards with their purchases both in and out of Starbucks stores.
What that sounds awesome, we don’t have all the details yet, so we’ll have to stay tuned to see exactly what they do and how they offer those rewards. Shortly after that statement another was put forth, which got MY ears perking up.
The second product, the Prepaid Visa card we have discussed on prior earnings calls will be introduced shortly thereafter. Both products will afford options, a very rich reward proposition for people who spend on credit and the unique store-value product offering rewards for customer who prefer debit.
“Store Value Product Offeringâ€
What exactly does that mean? To me, it sounds like with the Prepaid debit option you’ll be able to earn free in-store products with every load or every purchase? Perhaps you can load in a Starbucks store and use your money around town? Would you earn rewards on the load?
Airplane Coffee
Think about where this would go. If you could load your prepaid visa at a Starbucks, and they allow loading with a credit card, there are THOUSANDS of potential locations to load your prepaid card all over the USA. I’ll be curious to see if they limit this to cash/debit loads (think VGC’s) or if you can use this to pay off online bills (like Bluebird?).
The details are still vague, but once we know more, we’ll post it ASAP and keep you in the loop.
November 11, 2017
Greenbird?