In Green Dot Corp.’s earnings call on April 30, Steve Streit, Green Dot’s chief executive officer, said that revenue in the first quarrter was up 8 percent year over year and that the company saw solid growth even where it was competing directly with American Express’s Bluebird card.
So first, we’ll talk about Wal-Mart. The Bluebird product has been in-store since mid-October of 2012. Despite this, we still saw solid double-digit revenue growth of 11% in Wal-Mart in Q1…. Particularly encouraging were the strong gains in direct deposit enrolments and reloading activity that we saw amongst our MoneyCard customers. So the summary for Wal-Mart is that we believe that Bluebird is a very good product with great pricing and features but it is also fair to say that the Wal-Mart MoneyCard program has loyal following, continues to grow, and is successfully coexisting with Bluebird thus far.
The results indicate that prepaid card customers are not shopping for cards based only on fees or price alone. Liquidity, convenience of reload locations, ATM networks, and additional features and functions all can come into play as a buyer is deciding what prepaid card to use.
You can listen to the Green Dot conference call, which also includes information about its upcoming general launch of GoBank, its mobile banking product, here.
