Overview
Mercator Advisory Group’s forecast report identifies key segments that will continue to witness a decline over the next few years as well as those that should see growth. However, the economy, politics, and consumer behavior will all influence which segments grow and which decline.
This report reviews and forecasts load dollar volume for open-loop segments. This forecast highlights the segments approaching market saturation as well as those that will continue to experience double-digit annual growth.
"Prepaid providers should be evaluating their businesses and looking for ways to diversify," Ben Jackson, director of Mercator Advisory Group's Prepaid Advisory Service, and author of the report, comments. “Opportunities in the prepaid market shift with economic and regulatory changes. New technologies such as the Internet of Things, and new use cases such as corporate disbursements may provide growth markets in the years to come.”
This research report is 34 pages long.
Companies mentioned in this report include: American Express, Assurant Specialty Property, Citi, Discover, Enservio, Farmers Insurance, Green Dot, H&R Block, InsurCard, Liberty Mutual, Mastercard, Nationwide, State Farm, TSYS, Visa, Wageworks, and Wirecard AG.
One of the exhibits included in this report:

- Growth in the open-loop prepaid card market was uneven in 2016, with some traditionally fast growing segments seeing declines in total loads.
- Mercator Advisory Group forecasts that growth in the open-loop prepaid loads in the United States be 5% through 2020, reaching a total of $352.6 billion. Declines in some segments and slower growth in others have led Mercator Advisory group to revise its expectations for the overall market.
- The fastest growing segment continues to be the open-loop FSA/HSA Tax Deferred Programs segment, which has benefited from the trend towards high deductible health care plans paired with a Health Savings Account.
- Loads in the Money / Financial Services segment declined slightly as more people began using bank accounts and the industry worked to rebuild its reputation after previous glitches.
- The benefits segment grew quickly, buoyed
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