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Hopefully there is a happy ending in this somewhere, although it doesnt appear likely to be the case for the investors en masse.  Maybe Powa is/was ahead of its time, or maybe the market conditions or product weren't right, or they overstated the financial forecasts, or investors pulled the rug out too early (or too late).  This is though fairly typical of UK approach to high-growth Fintech businesses.  We seem happy to throw money into it and substantiate high multiples of future EBITDAs and then we act surprised and shut the doors on capital access if there is a head wind or a downturn somewhere.  However this shouldnt reflect on the entirety of the UK fintech space.

I agree here Matt.  The background to this is exactly as you say above, the issue of costs, which decline with the number of transactions anyway.  There have been so many positive roll outs of prepaid to pay out welfare and benefit payments globally (Post Italiane being the cream of the crop) and with UK Local Authorities who have been using prepaid cards to slash their cost of payments for Direct Care recipients.  There have been an awful lot of conversations with DWP and think tanks considering prepaid as one mechanism for payment of Universal Credit but not a great deal of momentum.

The only real cost that hurts in prepaid is ATM withdrawal.  And the real cost of that could probably be absorbed elsewhere.

This definitely isnt the industry norm for a data or card migration.  That can usually be measured in months, not days.  The article doesnt say how many cards were migrated or whether the transaction history was migrated (or just the balances) but moving the end point for settlement and a migration in days is pretty remarkable.

It would be interesting to know how large a migration this is/was I guess.