What always boggles my mind about about startups like this is the fact that their very existence is dependent on a giant company that could roll over and squash the life out of them. Their first product was a pre-paid Mastercard...which implies that they actually had to approach Mastercard with their idea. The idea makes sense and is a bit of a no-brainer...and one can suppose that Mastercard themselves had both the technical capability and resources to do it on their own...so what stopped them? How can a small idea guy feel comfortable exploring ideas like this with large corporate giants?
As I understand it: Mastercard's customers are the banks, and not the end users who hold the cards with their logos on them. Their job is to operate a network that interconnects the banks so they can process transactions for each other.
Them offering prepaid (or even straight-up credit) cards to end users directly would be a huge shift in how and why they do business.
