The use of vouchers as an incentive and motivational tool for staff has been around for a long time, this is a tried and tested product, however there are few Prepaid Card alternatives now available and they seem to be gaining a better response from the recipient than a specific retail partners voucher.

Some research undertaken by European Prepaid and one of our clients indicates that an incentive recipient would prefer an open loop prepaid card to a voucher.  A Prepaid Card  can offer the recipient to a choice of some 30 million locations to spend their incentive on whatever they want to.  A number of the responders to the research indicated that they preferred to try and earn additional incentives so that they could buy a more expensive item, this should in theory generate more staff striving to gain the incentive on offer so productivity or performance should increase.

One of the issues around using cards for incentives has been the potential tax implication; we do not profess to be tax experts here at European Prepaid and we would always recommend getting your own advice, however with some functionality tweaks for one client they were able to classify the Prepaid Card in the same way as a voucher was.  These tweaks are not trade secrets so we are happy to share these with you.  Our recommended functionality tweaks would be:

• No Cash Access – ATM or Cash back
• No fuel purchases
• No gaming transactions
• No purchase of foreign exchange

All of the functions can be controlled using the MCC (merchant category code) associated with this type of merchant and or transaction.