Advanced Payment Solutions (APS), provider of the Cashplus prepaid MasterCard today announced that it has won contracts to provide prepaid card programmes to Merton, Nottinghamshire and Bury councils.
APS is partnered with the Co-Operative Bank, and won these deals in direct competition against other High Street banks and prepaid card providers.
Rich Wagner, CEO of APS said: "These deals are fantastic news for APS. We're beating the banks on functionality and our proven track record of delivery to clients. We're up against some much bigger banking names than APS - but it's great to see government procurement teams focusing on functionality and value rather than just going straight for the perceived 'safe bet'. We've been operating in the UK market for nearly 6 years now, and we've built a reputation for innovative, functional payment solutions.
"We're winning contracts because we have a great product and more importantly unique functionality to offer local councils and their customers - and we're looking forward to partnering with Bury, Merton and Nottinghamshire councils to achieve their goals of extending existing government programmes in significantly more cost-effective ways than have been thought possible, and to help councils meet their 'Putting People First' vision of finding new ways to improve social care in England."
The three councils - Bury, Merton and Nottinghamshire councils - will enhance their benefit disbursement service to customers with prepaid Cashplus MasterCards from APS. Removing cash and replacing it with prepaid cards has a number of benefits for councils including better security, more control and more transparent auditing of what is actually being spent by customers.
There are also significant benefits for users of the service. Prepaid eliminates cumbersome manual processes in getting funds to customers. Furthermore, Cashplus from APS provides unique benefits not available from other providers. It enables free multiple fund loads across the faster payments network via existing bank accounts. Councils and customers can jointly make same day loads leveraging this faster payments network.
As Rich Wagner explains: "Everything about Cashplus has been designed to make it easy to use - and that's key to enabling a low-cost and effective way for councils to manage general disbursements and expenses."
Rich Wagner concludes: "The biggest benefit to the customer is that the card is a valuable replacement to a bank account and reduces the need of the customers to set up a separate bank account to receive the benefit, and then send in statements on a regular basis to the council to validate expenditures - this is all done by APS via it's prepaid card payment solution, saving time and money for the councils and enhancing the experience for the customer.
"We're confident that more and more councils will turn to APS to help them reduce costs and manage cash disbursement more effectively once they see the benefits that these councils are achieving from Cashplus prepaid solutions."