Prepaid cards

Grab and Mastercard have formed a partnership extending the reach of the ride-hailing app by making a prepaid card available to Grab’s 110 million users across Southeast Asia.

Netspend customers kept from accessing paychecks; Sen. Elizabeth Warren rebukes Comerica over fraud in benefits program; FDIC poised to revamp deposit rules (about time, say banks); and more from this week's most-read stories.

Customer furor stemmed from troubles FIS had processing payments for MetaBank, the issuer of Netspend and other prepaid debit cards.

Neither the prepaid issuer nor its bank partner can say when cardholders — many living paycheck to paycheck — will receive their funds.

In hundreds of cases, the prepaid card program run by the bank allegedly sent users’ funds to fraudsters who had stolen their data. The security lapse has now caught the attention of the Democratic senator.

Banks and credit unions will have to re-engineer a number of systems to meet the eclectic demands of the generation born roughly in the last 10 to 20 years.

Banks will have to re-engineer a number of systems to meet the eclectic demands of the generation born roughly in the last 10 to 20 years.

Just as Green Dot leveraged partnerships with the likes of Uber and Apple to expand its reach, Netspend also is looking to its retail partners including Kroger, CVS and Kohl’s for new digital payment use cases.

The payments, which total more than $10 million, stem from a 2017 settlement with the Federal Trade Commission. The agency charged that NetSpend deceived consumers by advertising that they could get immediate access to their funds.

Uber’s latest app update adds a stored-value account that incentivises riders to dive deeper into the Uber ecosystem — and away from their bank or mobile wallet provider.