Green Dot Corp. said Thursday that new card activations and increased usage by existing customers helped boost its third-quarter profits.
The Monrovia, Calif., marketer of prepaid cards posted a 30% year-over-year increase in operating revenue, to $115 million. The company's net income grew 48% from the previous year to $13.3 million, or 30 cents per diluted share.
Green Dot, which went public last year, sells prepaid cards mostly to underbanked consumers who do not have or regularly use traditional bank accounts. Its customers can load money onto the cards and use them like regular debit cards, but the cards are not linked to a traditional checking account.
Customers who reloaded money onto their cards for the first time "and gross dollar volume loaded through our network all indicate that our products' value proposition is increasingly resonating in the marketplace," Steve Streit, Green Dot's chairman and chief executive, said in a press release.
Green Dot said about 1.96 million of its general purpose re-loadable debit cards were activated in the third quarter. That represents an increase of 33%, or 490,000, over the previous year.
