Monday, October 13, 2003

It's all about prepayment now....?

New products on the market:

Oriental Bank of Commerce and Mastercard: OBC Prepaid card; The card is available from Rs 1,000 to Rs 50,000 and can be recharged any number of times at select OBC branches. The card is accepted at more than 60,000 merchant establishments and for withdrawing cash at MasterCard's network of 4,700 ATMs in India,

-Starbucks Duetto card, is the first prepaid card that also functions as a credit card. In addition to “loading” the card with cash that you can then spend inside Starbucks stores, as with most prepaid cards, you also can use it as a credit card at any merchant that accepts Visa. When consumers use the card as a credit card, they earn points that can then be redeemed for beverages or merchandise at Starbucks,

-Digi Beyond Prepay, automatically reloads pre-paid accounts from Visa-credit-cards,

-American Express Prepaid Travel Card, the new TravelFunds Card can be loaded with up to $3,000, or an equivalent amount of euros or British pounds. It can be used at any retailer or automated teller machine worldwide that accepts American Express cards. Consumers must fund the TravelFunds Card through an existing credit or debit card,

-CAMEL 3: SMS roaming for prepaid phone users, developed by Comverse. CAMEL-3 for SMS allows GSM operators to offer real-time charging for Mobile Originated Short Messages (MO-SMS) without the need for proprietary devices. The Comverse system supports a wide variety of real-time billing options. Charges can be based on the location of the sender, the destination of the message, the date and time, and more. Similarly, CAMEL-3 allows real-time charging for data services.