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Consumers will be able to use envelope-free ATMs to load funds onto Visa Inc. prepaid cards beginning this fall, the card brand announced today. Visa officials, who made the announcement at the Visa Innovation Briefing 2008 in New York, could not say how many ATMs will offer the function but said they expect the total to number in "the thousands." Until now, Visa prepaid cardholders have been able to load value onto the cards only at about 7,000 merchant locations, many of them supermarkets, Visa says. The cards include payroll, government benefits and general-spend cards. Merchants benefit from offering the reloading services, called Visa ReadyLink, because they collect fees from the prepaid card issuers and drive traffic to their stores, Elizabeth Buse, Visa global head of product, said during the briefing. Underbanked consumers benefit from ReadyLink, which Visa began offering in 2006, because they get access to some of the advantages of banking services at a reasonable cost, Buse said. The reloading service will work with any envelope-free ATM and requires no modifications by the ATM makers, she said. Most envelope-free ATMs are deployed in banks, but some off-premise ATMs accept deposits, and those locations could become candidates for envelope-free machines, Buse said.
