Fed wants to continue pre-paid card usage surveys

Surveys about usage of pre-paid card usage would be continued under a proposal by the Federal Reserve, to be published Thursday.

Under the proposal, both the mandatory and voluntary versions of the “Government-Administered, General-Use Prepaid Card Issuer Survey” would be extended for three years.

The mandatory version of the survey collects information from issuers of government-administered, general-use prepaid cards including card program information, cards outstanding, card funding, ATM transactions, purchase transactions, fees paid by issuers to third parties, interchange fees, and cardholder fees.

The voluntary version of the survey collects data from state governments (including the District of Columbia, and U.S. territories), and local government offices that administer general-use prepaid card payment programs. The data collection includes program information, the number of cards outstanding, and funding information.

The Fed said that the information collected from the surveys results in an annual report to Congress on the prevalence of use of general-use prepaid cards in federal, state, and local government-administered payment programs and on the interchange and cardholder fees charged with respect to such use of such cards.