This interview took place at Tech Crunch over the winter. It is an interesting window to the relationship between entrepreneurship and the story of building a business to serve the growing unbanked and underbanked population.

“This company serves a demographic that isn’t necessarily well-represented in this room,” (more…)

According to a report published yesterday, Rush Card owner Russell Simmons says his prepaid debit card will soon have a cash advance feature.

The advance will give customers who have enrolled their card in direct deposit the ability to draw cash two days ahead of their next scheduled paycheck or payment.

A spokesperson from Rush says that the service is free of a fee. Rush is going to extend the payment solely on the faith that customers with an existing direct deposit enrollment will have another coming in 48 hours.

The Rush Card is issued by Bancorp Bank. Since customer service at Rush only answers questions if you have an existing card, it is not possible to know the origin of this advance. It may be Bancorp, a different bank, or a non-bank financial institution.

Suze Orman will offer a low-cost prepaid debit card with free credit bureau reports.

The Approved Card has two important functions. First, the card only costs three dollars a month. The only card with a similar monthly fee is the Wal-Mart prepaid card.

Second, the card will offer free credit bureau reports from TransUnion. A credit bureau report is not a FICO score. The Suze Orman Approved Card will not reveal credit scores to its card holders, either. It will give users a good sense of how well they are doing to improve their credit.

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Even if people are ready to abandon the idea of using the prepaid card platform as a way to rebuild the credit of unbanked consumers, it is worth giving the idea another try.

Pay Rent Build Credit (“PRBC”) established a new model for helping people to build credit when it appended a non-traditional credit reporting service onto prepaid debit cards. The idea was to (more…)

Bank Freedom will no longer use MetaBank as the issuer for its prepaid debit cards. Bank Freedom follows a similar move by NetSpend to move business away from MetaBank in the wake of the regulatory interventions made against the Storm Lake, Iowa savings bank by the Office of Thrift Supervision.

Bank Freedom isn’t the first to distance itself from MetaBank. NetSpend has already begun to seek new relationships. Moreover, they have been fairly open about their motives. NetSpend (more…)