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08/12/2009 -
The benefits of payment card processing and prepaid card offerings do not end with merchants or even businesses - the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center recently implemented an internal payment processing system to reimburse clinical trial participants with prepaid cards.Payment processing industry magazine The Green Sheet reported that UPMC was tired of cutting and mailing paper checks to thousands of trial participants, and was fed up with trying to manage petty funds given out for the same purpose.
As a result, they decided to develop their own payroll cards and payment processing infrastructure.
"What we needed beyond payroll cards was a whole suite of accounting and control processes," Linda Zang, assistant treasurer at UPMC, told The Green Sheet. "[I]f you're running hundreds of studies, and you don't want to do manual accounting, you need a whole new infrastructure of software that lets you do this in an automated fashion."
UPMC now issues anonymous open-loop, reloadable, MasterCard Worldwide-branded prepaid debit cards to study participants, managed with an in-house software that meets government compliance regulations, The Green Sheet reported.
Merchants in other sectors may want to take note of this strategy, as the prepaid card industry is expected to experience higher growth levels than previously expected, Mercator Advisory Group recently reported.
