Prepaid cards: Help design a new disclosure

Today, we’re in Los Angeles, CA to show people potential disclosures that we may propose to be used on the packaging of prepaid cards. We’re developing new disclosures as part of a larger project that will provide a variety of protections for prepaid card users. We expect to propose a rule on this topic later this spring.

Current disclosures

Currently, each prepaid card company’s retail package discloses different information, which makes it difficult to do side-by-side comparisons. Below are a few examples of the disclosures that appear today on the packaging of several major prepaid cards that we recently bought in stores near our Washington headquarters:

As you can see from these examples, each prepaid card has a different style and format for presenting fee and other important information. We think this could make it difficult to find the information important to you and to compare fee information between cards.

We’re developing a model disclosure form to standardize these disclosures to include in the proposed rule. We want our model form to clearly present a prepaid card’s most important fees so you can easily identify the best prepaid card for your needs.

Testing new disclosures

To help us design this model disclosure, we’re conducting interview testing with consumers around the country. We’re presenting testing participants with versions of the forms we’ve developed to see which works the best. Our first round of testing took place last month in Baltimore, MD, our second round of testing begins today, and we expect to complete the testing in April.

These are two model form designs that we’re testing in Los Angeles:

Model form 1

Model form 2

Tell us what you think

Now, we want to hear from you! Take a look, and tell us if you think these model forms do a better job of disclosing fee information compared to other forms you’ve seen on prepaid card packaging. We’re eager to get feedback from anyone who is interested in making prepaid card disclosures better.

While you’re looking at the forms, think about these questions:

Do you understand how much each of these cards will cost to use? What would you like to see added or changed? Is there some way to make the information clearer? Is there anything you find confusing?

We want to get your feedback now so that we can consider it as we continue testing model forms over the next few weeks.

If you want to influence the design of a new prepaid card fee disclosure, let us know what you think! You can use the comments section below, send us a tweet , let us know on Facebook or send us an email.