Industry News

  A new and comprehensive guide to the use of Prepaid cards in Local Government has been produced by the National Prepaid Cards Steering Group, supported by MasterCard.

For the first time a group has been formed which has brought together councils who are using Prepaid cards, councils who are interested in implementing Prepaid card programmes and wanting to learn more about others’ experiences, and representatives from the supply side in the form of Programme Managers, who provide the end to end managed service.

The Steering Group has discussed many of the issues facing councils and suppliers in an open and constructive way which has enabled Programme Managers to better understand the real needs of councils and so tailor their products to enable councils to extract the best possible value and return on investment from their implementations.

An online resource library has been created which contains many of the presentations, business documents, business cases and implementation materials that the councils and Programme Managers have used in the course of their work. This should allow councils to make more rapid progress by learning from the experiences of those that have gone before and adapting the documentation for their own use. Selected highlights from the report: 

• Local Authorities now state the single biggest cost saving coming from Prepaid is based on their ability to claw back unspent or mismanaged funds – this saving equates to between 5-10% of their total Direct Payments budget.
• The London Borough of Brent have already realised 330K in savings within 9 months and Lancashire County Council forecast £4M in savings from a budget of £40M.
• Local Authorities are also recognising the value of the MI from Prepaid programmes to support evidence based service demand planning.

Click here to download your free copy of the guide now.
 

Date Posted

14/10/2013 17:24