E-purse

Types of cards

There are mainly three types of cards, depending on the way money is withdrawn to the merchant’s account:

  • debit card: where the money is automatically deduced from your bank account. It is directly linked to your account, which means you need to have a enough money or an agreed upon overdraft 1.
  • credit card: they are not linked to your account, they allow you to buy things immediatelly and pay for their costs at a later time. I find the urge to elaborate more on this part as it is quite interesting. You have a credit score

It’s a cumulative number that measures your success relative to others, in this case grading you as a credit-worthy individual. 3

You can simplify this process by the classical neighbourhood grocery where you pay your expenses at the end of the month. The grocery owners estimate how capable you are of paying your debit and based on that they might opt out some customers. It works exactly the same, however, banks apply higher interest rates on applicants with poor credit score (relative to others).

It is like lending from a bank and paying your debts at a certain time.

  • prepaid card: is the easiest kind of cards to acquire. There is neither credit check nor a bank account required. Prepaid card were originally existed for people with poor to no credit history 2.

Prepaid cards are the one relevant to our post today: EBS’s epurse cards.

ePurse cards

Just like what other’s have done, with different rationale though, EBS, our national switch system, has introduced the concept of the ePurse cards. And they have thought thoroughly about it. The idea is that they want people at amass to have bank accounts–or, more correctly, they want the cash to be within the payment network. The estimated number of Sudanese with bank accounts bounces around %10 [4].

  • they want to get as many people into the payment network as possible.
  • prepaid cards are really easy to obtain: you can have one in a minute (actually, in Morsal, we stress on this part heavily)
  • no barriers for adoption; you really just need your phone to register.
  • it is not actually prepaid. It came with 0 amount. Which made it even easier to have as many as you want.

[4]: Citation is needed.