Visa reloadable prepaid card

What goes into picking a Visa reloadable prepaid card? Although consumers tend to stick with whichever card offers to deliver the most points and rewards, business owners must be more discerning. Whether you’re paying for fleet maintenance, equipment or office consumables, you need a card that goes beyond bells and whistles.

How can you distinguish between extras and essential features? Use these pointers to get a handle on how Visa prepaid cards work and master the basics of business finance.

What is a Visa reloadable prepaid card?

A reloadable Visa prepaid card connects to a sandboxed, or isolated, funding account that you control. To pay for future purchases, you load the card by depositing whatever sum of money you deem fit. These cards look just like credit cards and work in all the same locations. Prepay funding, however, means that they don’t expose companies to quite as much danger of accumulating an adverse credit history in the course of making routine purchases.

Why companies are considering migrating away from credit

According to the Federal Reserve’s 2016 Small Business Credit Survey, only 53 percent of small U.S. firms operate at a profit. While this doesn’t mean that enterprises are failing left and right, it underscores an undeniable reality: Not every firm can afford to waste money on late fees, high-APR interest and other unavoidable aspects of using credit.

Prepaid cards are nothing new either, so don’t worry about being the entrepreneurial guinea pig for some crazy economic experiment. Long popular among big-spending consumers, these cards are gaining traction in the business realm thanks to their security, oversight and convenience features.

Can you refill a Visa prepaid card?

Not all prepaid cards are refillable, and this can be a source of trouble. For instance, if you pick up gift cards or similar products from retailers or merchants, you’ll probably be limited to an arbitrary amount of starting funding.

Fortunately, Visa prepaid cards for business use are way more flexible. They make it simple to add money on demand using your smartphone, and you can draw from any common funding source. This freedom of choice empowers you to control heavy spenders who might otherwise drain your procurement budget.

How much money can you put on a Visa reloadable prepaid card? It’s entirely up to you, and the best cards make it easy to test the waters as safely as possible — They include FDIC insurance that keeps thousands of companies secure and satisfied with their accounting practices.

How much does a Visa reloadable payment card cost?

Like other vital business tools, reloadable prepaid cards from Visa come in different types. Unlike with credit, however, you can forget about migraine-inducing horrors such as:

• Interest rates
• Overdraft fees
• Setup fees
• Annual fees
• Onerous contracts
• Foreign transaction fees
• ATM surcharges

Instead of dealing with all these problems, you only must pay a flat-rate monthly price to keep your business debit accounts running healthily. Since many card providers have free sign-up trials, it’s not too hard to evaluate whether these costs are justified.

What is the best Visa reloadable prepaid card?

Reloadable prepaid Visa debit cards evolve. Since these payment tools are consummately modern, their makers regularly offer new features and perks that might change your opinion.

One good way to choose a card that suits your business is to check out what other companies and corporate leaders have said. For instance, some reviewers prefer cards that cater exclusively to businesses instead of just being polished versions of consumer-grade banking products.

Reading reviews could stop you from making a terrible business choice — You might fall in love with a card only to discover that it has a confusing app dashboard or buggy notification system. To maintain a high signal-to-noise ratio, look for reviewer feedback that focuses on spending controls, digital security features, and other tools that facilitate business activities.

Do reloadable prepaid Visa debit card products have fees?

Although reloadable prepaid Visa cards aren’t free, they lack fees in the traditional sense. Credit cards include everything from surcharges for using overdraft protection that should be free to annual fees that might even cancel out what you earn in points. With a reloadable Visa prepaid card, you get all the perks without being taxed for routine business activities and transactions.

What’s the difference between a Visa reloadable prepaid card and a business Visa debit card?

Although people may use these terms interchangeably, it’s important to look at the fine details. Some commercial-branded debit cards are just standard banking products that attach to regular checking accounts — While they’re technically reloadable, they also carry burdens like restrictions on how many cards you can use.

Not all cards support advanced business functionality either. Always watch out for cards that lack the fundamental essentials, such as anti-fraud tools and custom mobile alerts.

How secure are reloadable prepaid cards?

Once again, different products mean that the playing field is full of varied options. Although shared payment networks and PCI DSS standards make prepaid cards from Visa just as convenient as credit, they come loaded with useful extras that render them even safer.

Effective payment security involves many tasks that should be familiar to small business owners, such as controlling who has access to your account information and monitoring your cards for unauthorized purchases. At the same time, there are a few hurdles that only business-oriented Visa reloadable prepaid debit cards seem to solve consistently.

In other words, although any card can carry FDIC insurance or include a security chip, those that also integrate with your native business systems while supporting smart account monitoring practices are rarer breeds.

Business fraud risk mitigation

Is using a Visa reloadable prepaid debit card an effective strategy for fighting fraud? Considering that 63 percent of businesses that experience fraud will face equally severe or worse repeat incidents within 12 months, the question isn’t purely academic.

Visa reloadable cards help merchants and other businesses fight fraud in many useful ways, such as:

• Giving leaders more power to set the tone for acceptable spending practices
• Eliminating the typical burdens of procurement and acquisition oversight, such as expense reporting and reimbursement
• Setting no-nonsense spending limits that are impossible to exceed
• Restricting spending by category to stop common forms of fraud that might occur in the field
• Generating reports and feedback on a minute-by-minute basis instead of just monthly like most credit cards do
• Letting companies create multiple card accounts to improve transparency and make spending activity easier to trace

Is a prepaid reloadable Visa card a debit card or credit card?

The best reloadable prepaid Visa card products are debit tools — They lack the fees, surcharges, and dream-killing credit histories that most business owners are woefully resigned to facing. Nonetheless, they still power online purchases, business-to-business transactions, and private spending.

Who uses reloadable prepaid cards and why?

Reloadable prepaid cards serve a special breed of business owner. They cater to those who’d rather not rely on rewards to take the sting out of using fee-heavy corporate credit cards.

A company might use a reloadable prepaid Visa card with no fees to make essential transactions more cost-effective. Many businesses distribute cards to their traveling employees so that they can make purchases on the go. Others grant them to office managers to ensure that projects flow smoothly and generate sensible “paper” trails.

Virtual cards

A virtual card is a payment card without the physical card. Instead, you receive a number that you give to authorized employees who’ll use it to transact online or place orders with your vendors.

A business debit card from Visa can also be a virtual card. In addition to letting you open an account that’s only associated with a number, they include controls similar to virtual cards known as procurement cards, such as letting you choose where, when and how much cardholders can spend.

Reloadable prepaid Visa card alternatives

Wondering how to get all the features of reloadable prepaid Visa card plus the spending controls? With Bento for Business Visa debit cards, you can have the best of both worlds. It’s simple to try the cards out for yourself. The online signup process takes about five minutes.

These business Visa debit cards let you decide who spends which funds and restrict activity to fight fraud. Since all the action happens on your cellphone screen, however, you’re free to authorize trips, business dinners, innovative research and development initiatives, ad campaigns and whatever else helps your business thrive.

Thanks to our FDIC insurance, built-in security and commitment to companies, we’re the industry leader in future-ready small business payment tools — Just ask reviewers on TrustPilot or experts from the Wall Street Journal. Discover why we’re the right choice with a free 60-day trial and demo, or call 866.220.8455 to get started.

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