AMEX Revs Up Bluebird/Serve Marketing Stealing More of Your Checking Revenue

The Wall Street Journal reports that American Express is revving up marketing for Bluebird with Walmart and its own Serve prepaid product sold through drug and convenience stores.  Bluebird allows check writing but has no overdraft fees or return check fees, and is meant to be more like a checking account according to Amex.  The WSJ report documents that consumers spent $182 Billion with prepaid plastic last year.  Those are payment transactions of your customers reflecting revenue opportunities you lost.

Their key marketing message is “no overdraft fees ever.”  The Pew Trust study  reports that consumer preference for “no overdraft fees ever” is one of the main reasons the rapid growth of prepaid cards by mainstream Americans.  Prepaid cards will equal 20% of all debit transactions by 2015.  Prepaid cards are only one of the ways your checking consumers are shifting revenue out of your checking accounts.  PayPal captures transaction revenues and offsets your overdraft services with BillMeLater.  Financial aggregators, merchant funded offers and retailers with their own decoupled debit card like Target’s Red Card are growing while checking accounts revenues have fallen 20% in recent years.  All this means you are losing transactions and revenues from you checking accounts to these non-bank competitors.

You can fight back with the profitable PaySound^® Checking Plan with “no overdraft fees ever” without putting any exiting fee revenues at risk.  Want to learn more?