| Prepaid cards developed rapidly in recent years, with the industry chain system about card issuer, card acceptance, card sales and back office management created. There is a pattern of parallel development of single-purpose prepaid cards and multi-purpose prepaid cards. But prepaid consumer which brings convenience to us is highly appealed as well, such as difficulties in returning prepayments, rights restricted by format terms. As the new competition means, prepaid cards adapt to consumers’ demand for convenient payment. So it is not reasonable to ban prepaid cards as vouchers. Now academics and substantive departments called for strengthening supervision, a series of normative documents for single-purpose and multi-purpose prepaid cards had been promulgated. In foreign countries, the legal regulations on prepaid cards have two types, one is dispersed regulation the other is centralized supervision.Exist does not mean that reasonable, the rationality of government took regulatory measures to intervene the field of private law till need argumentation, even if some regulations had been taken. When we study the legal relationship among different subjects, it is easy to find that consumers are in more unfavorable weak position compared to previous consumption patterns, such as consumers offer unilateral long-term credit, the right to choose is weakened in essence and information asymmetry is more obvious. In the game of market players, market failure exists in prepaid cards market. A good credit environment in prepaid cards will take a long time by the means of survival of the fittest. So we should pay more attention to prevention instead of afterwards relief. Before some specialized normative documents made, there were difficulties in resolving the prepaid cards problems whether it is in civil law, economic law, administrative law, or criminal law. According to these, government can take some regulations to restore equal status between the operators and consumers. The regulation measures can be grouped into two categories. One which restrict on freedom more stringent includes limiting eligibility, limiting issue size, forcing to provide debt guarantees and so on. The other kind which less restricts on freedom involves contract guidelines, information tools and incentive measures. Of course, the effect of different regulatory measures is different. Except that, administrative regulation is not the only choice to solve problems in prepaid cards. We will get better results if we stimulate spontaneous forces of social groups to achieve self-discipline and make full use of post-liability regulation to achieve co-regulation.The problems in prepaid cards and causes are the first part of this paper. After listing the typical behavior violating the rights and interests of consumers, this paper try to find the underlying causes of the problems. As to the rationality of prepaid cards existence, what we should do is to find the best way to regulate instead of prohibition. The second part is mainly to summary the historical change of the regulatory measures, including domestic and foreign regulations. Because some regulatory measures had been taken, the necessity for government take administrative regulation must be answered, and the third part aim to answer this question. This part draws up a conclusion that it’s necessary to take administrative regulation and ensure adequacy by study market failure and legal dilemmas. The forth part introduces regulatory measures which divided into two categories based on the different influence on operators’ freedom, and this part evaluates the effect of each measures. As a supplement, the fifth part is about how to achieve co-regulation. Both self-regulation in social groups and cooperation between administrative regulation and post-liability regulation are necessary. The last part is not only the review of this paper, but also the collation of regulatory ideas which can inspire the government to make response to other new consumer patterns in the future. |
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