The Secret of Stored Value Cards (Security Deposits)

How gift cards make money—what I'm about to say will shock you. Selling price difference: A 500-yuan card has a face value of 490 and a 10-yuan deposit.

• Interest spread: When you buy a gift card, you won't spend the entire balance all at once. The average consumption cycle is 6–12 months. During that time, the card issuer can earn a steady 6% spread just by investing the funds. 【It's much harder to get such high returns now; it used to be around 8%.】
• Balance decay: A gift card rarely gets drained to zero. On average, a card will have 1–2 yuan left before it's abandoned. Estimating 2 yuan per card, the balance decay on a 500-yuan card is about 0.4%. 【Years ago, there were criminal cases involving banks keeping fractions of a cent—amounts in the tens of millions or even hundreds of millions.】
• Deposit loss: The deposit is refundable, but 80% of people won't go out of their way to ride to a designated location just to get their 10-yuan deposit back. This is part of the trap. When you sell the card, they say the deposit is refundable anytime, but when you actually try to return it, all sorts of inconveniences and restrictions appear—for example, the refund location is far away at a centralized processing point. Subway cards are the same; not every station allows refunds. The deposit profit is around 2%. 【Once you pay the deposit, it's hard to get it back.】
• Loss from lost cards: This is the biggest revenue stream for the card issuer! As soon as a card is lost, it becomes the issuer's profit. We all lose things through carelessness—the kind of stuff that might slip through a door crack and never be found again. A remaining balance of 30–40 yuan, and the card is bent or broken. The amount lost this way is huge. Conservatively, it's at least 1%.
• Processing fees: This doesn't affect individual cardholders; it's charged to merchants. Just like Alipay charges merchants 0.6% and UnionPay charges 0.7% that's how it works. So they squeeze the users first, then squeeze the merchants—what a thrill! 【The processing fee might be around 2%, but merchants often get payment discounts—for example, schools are fee-free, and some industries pay as low as 0.2%, creating a fee spread.】
• Payment terms: Another way they squeeze merchants. When a user spends their card balance, the merchant doesn't receive the money from the card issuer immediately. There's a 3-month payment delay before settlement.

When you add it all up, the gross margin for a card-issuing company is around 7%, and the key is that this business is essentially zero-cost! Let's do the math: if they issue 1,000,000 cards at a face value of 500 each, the gross profit would be 35 million yuan. 【In reality, it's still quite difficult, which is why gyms often go bankrupt and disappear. But the general logic is along these lines. E-commerce platforms, for example, focus first on boosting transaction volume. Insurance and banking businesses have similar models.】

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