Highlights strategic opportunity for the financial services industry to provide tools that help consumers budget effectively
REDWOOD CITY, Calif. – April 1, 2014 – A white paper released today to mark the start of Financial Literacy Month in the United States details the benefits of prepaid and related technologies in helping consumers manage their finances. The paper, “Budgeting: How Prepaid Helps Deliver Personal Financial Success”, examines the underlying reasons why consumers choose to budget, challenges encountered in the budgeting process, and specific prepaid technologies that help consumers overcome the challenges. i2c Inc., a provider of prepaid processing and emerging commerce solutions, commissioned Gx, a global payments research firm and consultancy, to develop the paper.
Budgeting is considered by experts to be one of the most effective tools consumers can use to build a strong and stable financial future. The paper’s author, business professor and consumer finance researcher Dan Horne, says that today’s prepaid technologies are effective for budgeting because they provide mechanisms that help consumers overcome some natural tendencies that often lead to financial missteps.
“In a promotion-driven economy, there are always strong impulses to make the kind of unplanned purchases that derail the best intentions of consumers,” he says. “Prepaid cards by their very nature train people to spend only what they have. Features of these cards, such as specific spending purses, text alerts and consumer-appointed financial buddies, provide additional proactive assistance to help consumers stay on a sound financial path.”
“Banks and financial institutions stand to gain a competitive advantage by helping to meet consumer needs for more effective budgeting tools. Those that can package these tools into a financial management solution that helps consumers achieve personal financial success will enjoy more loyal and potentially profitable customers,” adds Horne.
About i2c Inc.
An award-winning global financial technology innovator powering credit, debit, prepaid, core banking, and money movement solutions, i2c unifies banking and payments in an all-in-one platform, transforming product personalization with a customer-centric architecture and accelerating speed-to-market with composable building-block solutions. Financial institutions and fintechs globally trust i2c to help them quickly and efficiently configure and scale differentiated financial offerings in an evolving, competitive market. Powered by innovation and driven by trust for more than 24 years, i2c blends modern ingenuity with expert reliability to supercharge exceptional banking and payments experiences for millions of users and billions of transactions worldwide.
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