The Current State of Pathward

Another post about Metabank Pathward gift cards? Yep! Sorry not sorry. Let’s start with liquidation methods.

Liquidation

Public options include:

  • Kiva
  • BravoPay
  • money orders

Quasi-public options:

  • Reloadable cards like Bluebird and Serve
  • Photo-kiosk assistance at a a major retail chain

And private options include:

Remember the MEAB unofficial site tagline: Always be probing.

PIN Transaction Limits

  • There’s more to the liquidation story though – BlackHawk Network, the underlying processing service powering MetaBank Pathward, has recently implemented transaction limits for PIN based transactions. The current restrictions as we know them:
  • $480 maximum per store per rolling 6 minutes, per type of card (ex regular Visa vs Everywhere)
  • Multiple declines will lock a card for one to two day
  • There may also be a non-PIN debit limit, though reports on those are mixed at best so let’s consider it a ymmv proposition

What’s Next?

Well, there are lots of answers but I think we can group them into one of two points:

  • Visa and Mastercard gift cards aren’t the only manufactured spend technique out there
  • Pathward isn’t the only Visa and Mastercard gift card issuer

Good luck friends!

Google Bard’s summary of this post.

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