Debit Card Program Services

The Vendor is required to provide assistance with building debit card program to support local businesses.
- Citizens purchase virtual or physical gift cards, which can be used at many establishments in town.
- Generally, we find there to be good excitement surrounding the program, but that excitement is muffled by frustration with the Yiftee platform on which it is based.
- Although yiftee issues its card through the MasterCard network, merchants find it difficult to process yiftee cards on their POS systems. 
- Citizens typically prefer a physical card (with or without a virtual analogue) and yiftee makes it very difficult for us to provide one.
- Services include:
• Ease-of-use for citizens. Ideally, they could walk into the town office and buy a physical card which would work like an ordinary visa or MasterCard.
• It might work if an online application were required, but only because we would help them apply. 
• Co-branding. The ability to co-brand the card as a town card. 
• Regulatory and technical support. There are surely technical issues with payment networks and regulatory issues overlaying debit cards. 
• We need a vendor who will handle all of these industry-specific issues. 
• Limiting merchant participation. The ability to limit merchant participation in some way. 
• The yiftee system requires merchants to opt-in to the program. 
• Generally speaking, this requirement has proved acceptable, but ideally, geofencing would simply limit the card’s use to our immediate area. 
• Ease-of-use for merchants. The yiftee system often proves to be difficult for our merchants to manage properly. 
• For example, there is no way to swipe a card into their POS systems, so the customer’s experience is only as good as the cashier’s training. 
• The current system creates other problems for undertrained cashiers when a customer wants to leave a tip or when the purchase exceeds the card balance. 
• Our ability to subsidize card purchases. We have found that even modest subsidization greatly stimulates citizen purchases. 
• In a world with a myriad of payment choices, civic pride requires a little financial boost.