Anders, >To be honest, being a European I don't have all the information >concerning P-cards as they have failed here. But AFAIK there >is a profile register held by the card issuer. I.e. this is the >centralized part of this system which I don't like.
Don't feel like you are out of the loop. I believe most people in the U.S. don't have a lot of information on purchase cards either. Independent of P-cards, it seems to me that the issuing bank already has a centralized system that has a number of parameters they use to authorize or deny transactions. My sense is that P-cards are just a slight tweak technically (a few extra fields that are checked to possibly deny transactions) to what the card issuing bank is already doing. The beauty of this, to the banks anyway, is that it can be packaged as a new product. Now that I think about it, kid cards such as Visa Buxx, are pretty much the same thing as well. Another way to take the same underlying system (checking transaction attributes against account limits) and repurpose it as another product for another market. I would welcome input from anyone on this list that could point to good, online resources that describe how purchase cards work. - Russ
