Never risk a missed payment again with a prepaid card

Everyone seems so busy these days that it’s very easy to miss a payment for anything from a power supplier to a mobile phone provider. But missing a bill payment can have serious repercussions for a person’s credit rating. That’s because credit bureau scores are generally based on 5 main areas of information, which added together make up the rating. Payment history reveals a person’s track record for paying on time and is deemed so important that it can make up as much as 35%* of the credit score.

Fortunately there’s a simple way to avoid missing payments: set up standing orders to take care of the bills. In fact, anyone with regular bills and subscriptions to pay on the same date for the same amount of money could benefit - especially now that some Mastercard prepaid debit cards are offering the valuable standing order feature.

For example, the prepaid Gold MasterCard® enables cardholders to set up as many as 20 payments a month for free, via standing orders or one-off transfers. As well as making paying bills quick and easy, standing orders can save money – in a couple of ways.

Firstly, they can help avoid late payment fees, and having to pay the price if the customer’s credit rating becomes damaged. Secondly, paying by standing order can deliver all sorts of discounts, from money off subscriptions with book clubs to 4% off the unit rates for energy with Southern Electric†.

When you think about how many bills there are to regularly pay, it soon becomes easy to realise that the standing order discounts could add up to a pretty useful amount. Then add on top the Cashback Rewards available with the prepaid card for everything from BT and Vodaphone to British Gas and it becomes clear that all in all the card could help save a lot of money.

The prepaid card also offers other handy features, such as one called CreditbuilderTM, which is designed to do what it says – build your credit rating. So if a customer has already damaged their credit rating, adding Creditbuilder at no extra cost could help repair the negative impact that past late payments may have caused to their credit rating.

So, anyone that’s concerned about the amount of time that they spend on paying their bills and is worried about paying them on time, should take a look at what prepaid cards have to offer. After all, as long as there’s enough money in the card’s account to pay the bill, the cardholder never need miss a bill payment again.