Prepaid cards to overshadow traditional payment methods

The marketplace has experienced rapid and radical change in recent years, as new forms of payment processing technology and debt collection methods continue to debut. This clear shift toward an increasingly paperless consumer landscape has made it imperative for merchants, banks and other entities that process transactions to adopt new systems. Business Insider recently published a story that purported prepaid cards will eventually make traditional checking accounts a thing of the past. The source cites the Durbin Amendment of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform Act as one of the first and foremost catalysts of the change, as banks are increasingly pushing prepaid cards to circumvent legislation. The Durbin Amendment lowered the amount of fees financial institutions could levy against users for card swipes. Now, these fees are prohibited from exceeding 12 cents, though banks with lower revenues are exempt from the legislation. Following this, Business Insider notes, banks that had once offered free checking had difficulty continuing the perk. However, big banks entering the prepaid card game have served as a solution in many cases, while the source cites research that forecasts volume of prepaid payment volumes to experience more than 20 percent year-over-year growth in 2012.