Plastiq sent out an email yesterday advising that they will no longer accept personal prepaid debit cards (including both reloadable cards as well as gift cards) as of January 1, 2020. These types of cards can still be used for payments as of now, but users will be limited to $7500 in total payments on prepaid cards from December 17, 2019 to December 31, 2019. Beginning on January 1, 2020, charges will not process on prepaid personal cards.
Plastiq now lists the following text in their online help section:
As of January 1, 2020, Plastiq will no longer support payments made with personal prepaid debit cards. Payments made with business prepaid cards and payroll cards will continue to be accepted.
After this date, Plastiq customers will be unable to add a personal prepaid debit card to their account and any attempts to submit a payment using a personal prepaid debit card will be declined.
The following card types qualify as “prepaid cards”:
- Gift cards
- Retail cards
- General-purpose reloadable cards
For the remaining period of 2019, customers using this payment method to submit payments with Plastiq will have an amount limit of $7,500. Once an account reaches this limit, Plastiq will decline all further payments submitted with these cards.
For any questions regarding this policy update, please feel free to reach out to our Support team via live chat. You can also send us an email at service@plastiq.com.
Again, this affects all personal prepaid debit cards, and they clearly included both gift cards and reloadable cards in that definition. While this hasn’t been much of a play for most such cards, apparently some had processed with a 1% fee.
H/T: Doctor of Credit
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OneVanilla Mastercards were 1% fee. I’d pick up several $500 cards and use for my mortgage and dad’s mortgage to meet a lot of min spend.
What exactly is a business prepaid card and how is it different then a personal prepaid cards? and how can Plastiq tell the difference?
As to what constitutes a business debit card, I think that remains to be seen when the change is implemented.
As to how they can tell the difference, I would assume by card number. Chase Luxury hotels requires (or used to require?) that you enter the first 6 digits of your card in order to verify that you have a Chase Visa Infinite, so obviously those first six digits were specific to Chase Visa Infinite cards. My understanding is that there are different credit card processing fees depending on whether you use a business or personal credit card, so I’d assume that there is some part of the credit card number that identifies the card type in terms of business or personal, Visa Signature versus Visa Platinum or whatever, etc. Of course, I don’t know exactly how Plastiq is going to implement this, but my assumption is that it’s relatively easy to do on the back end somewhere.