CardBreakageCardbreakage

Prepaid & stored value

Open-loop and reloadable prepaid products

Products where dormancy, fee mechanics, and regulatory treatment interact — and where residual balances are the most misunderstood part of the liability.

What drives breakage here

The behavior specific to this program type

Dormancy dynamics

Prepaid balances often go quiet rather than reaching zero, producing long tails of small inactive value that behave nothing like active accounts.

Fee interaction

Maintenance and inactivity mechanics change the trajectory of residual balances and must be modeled separately from customer redemption.

Reload behavior

Reloadable products blur cohort boundaries; funding events have to be treated as their own issuance vintages.

Regulatory sensitivity

Open-loop structures carry heightened unclaimed-property attention, so behaviorally dead value needs explicit exposure mapping.

How we analyze it

Our approach for this structure

Every step is built from your own history and reconciled to your reported position.

  1. 01Reconstruct funding and spend events per account, treating each load as a distinct cohort.
  2. 02Separate customer-driven redemption from fee-driven balance reduction.
  3. 03Define behavioral dormancy thresholds from observed inactivity distributions rather than policy defaults.
  4. 04Model terminal residual balances by product tier and load size.
  5. 05Quantify the inactive share of outstanding value and its aging profile.
  6. 06Map dormant balances against jurisdictional dormancy characteristics for exposure assessment.

Signals

When an audit is worth running

Long inactive tail

A large count of low-balance accounts with no activity for multiple years.

Fee policy change

Inactivity or maintenance mechanics changed and the liability model was never updated.

Unclaimed-property review

You need a quantified view of dormant value before a compliance assessment.

Engagement

Run your breakage audit

A confidential, analyst-led review of your stored-value liability — expected breakage, redemption behavior, and escheatment exposure quantified against your own data.

No engagement commitment required. Scope is confirmed before work begins.

Run My Breakage AuditReview Methodology