My daughter is traveling out of the country. Instead of giving her traveler's checks we gave her a Visa Travel Money card. Basically, it's a prepaid Visa card (and can thus be used as a Visa card or a debit/ATM card), and we get to monitor usage, and can load additional funds online if she needs it. And unlike traveler's checks, if the card gets lost or stolen we can stop the funds and have them transferred to a new card. Nice system.
When an agent at my local AAA office filled in online forms to establish the account and load the funds I could not help but notice .cfm in the URLs on his monitor (for both the internal setup domain, as well as the domain used for account maintenance). And obviously, that prompted a little sleuthing. So ...
AAA Prepaid Cards are actually powered by Florida based WildCard Systems, Inc. (now owned by eFunds Prepaid Solutions). WildCard is a technology leader for electronic host based stored-value cards, virtual stored-value accounts, and Internet payment. They offer a variety of products, from incentive cards to MasterCard/Visa gift cards to insurance claim cards and more. And they also offer Visa TravelMoney. But what is most impressive is their partner list which includes Visa, MasterCard, Discover, Bank of America, Bank One, Capital One, Citibank, Fleet Bank, MBNA, NationalCity, US Bank, Wells Fargo, Wachovia ... and that is just banks and financial companies. They also power all sorts of consumer and business products, including a rewards program for Konica, gift cards for Yahoo! and AOL, and a sweepstake program for Lipton. Which means that lots of folks, whether they know it or not, are using WildCard products and services.
And WildCard, both the public corporate site, as well as the customer branded account management sites (like the AAA)one, are powered by ColdFusion.
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