Prepaid Cards and Banking Services for the Unbanked

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If you find that you have been turned down for a bank account by one of the high street banks, you are very unlikely to be alone. Everyday people get turned away due to bad credit, or some aspect of their financial history that affects their credit rating and hence, they are unable to get access to a Credit Card or a bank account.

This adds stress to what is becoming an increasingly complicated lifestyle anyway but now, a number of firms are popping up which provide a prepaid credit card linked to a basic bank account with the reported aim of taking the stress out of managing your finances.

ClearCash and OneBanking are just two such companies which offer a basic bank account with a prepaid card or offer some sort of facility such as ClearCash’s Budgetmaster to manage personal finance.

What do these firms actually provide?

Essentially, what these firms offer is not a bank account but rather by using their services, one could potentially replace many of the features that a bank account provides by providing you with tools to pay all of your bills online and help you budget responsibly.

No credit is offered and there is typically a small monthly fee chargeable but the fact that you cannot get overdrawn or incur any extra charges as you may do with your bank more than makes up for this small charge .

With all such accounts, you also have a number of extra benefits in addition to enjoying all the benefits of having access to an electronic piece of plastic.

Additional Benefits

A number of such services even provide you with the opportunity to build your credit history by offering Credit Builder and Credit repair tools which means that even if your credit history is not up to scratch today, you could build it up by using these products responsibly and overtime, actually become eligible for other credit enabled products.

One of the other benefits that most of these companies offers is cashback and purchase protection at on extra cost making this an even more attractive proposition for consumers.

Banks not doing their bit yet

The question most consumers ask is that with prepaid card companies showing initiative and branching into providing banking type services, why banks haven’t shown the same initiative to offer more prepaid card services. The involvement of banks within prepaid seems to be limited to a few products and the major role that banks are playing seems limited to being BIN sponsors and providing processing services. That’s something only the banks can answer!

Compare Prepaid Cards for the unbanked at Prepaid365 and find the card that is right for you.

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