EMerchants to go live with prepaid MastercCard

Brisbane-based prepaid card venture EMerchants will soft launch a prepaid MasterCard next week. Aimed at the corporate travel market, the card has been developed with capital from EMerchant's new controlling shareholder Globetrotter Corporate Travel.

The first prepaid MasterCard in a segment dominated by Visa, the EMerchant's MasterCard is also the first prepaid scheme card in Australia to be issued by a third-party processor, rather than an ADI, since the short-lived Bopo card.

The MasterCard project took about 18 months and two million dollars to develop, said chief operating officer of EMerchants, Tony Ferguson. Now that development work is completed, the focus of the company has changed, said Ferguson, from development to marketing.

"There was quite a bit of work to bring this MasterCard product online, certainly more than we originally anticipated. There were AML/CTF and PCI DSS changes that came in during that period.

"Meeting PCI - there was quite a bit in that in terms of firewalling, structuring our applications and changing that to comply - and a lot of hardware changes that we had to go through and quite a number of security updates we had to apply to the system.

"There is quite a focus change now for the company," said Ferguson. "Up until now we have been primarily in development of products and now we have a few milestones completed we are about marketing."

The card is due to go live next Friday. EMerchants will receive interchange fees on the MasterCard transactions as opposed to paying interchange fees on the Eftpos cards.