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Carphone Warehouse to launch mobile prepay card

British mobile phone retailer Carphone Warehouse is collaborating with Monitise plc and Metavente Technologies Ltd. to introduce a mobile prepay card.

Managed directly from the mobile phone, the card will let shoppers by in retail stores worldwide.

"The launch of the Carphone Warehouse prepay card will change the way consumers shop and manage their money, while also making online and telephone shopping more convenient and secure," said Alastair Lukies, CEO of Monitise, in a statement from London.

The news comes soon after Best Buy Co. and Carphone agreed to form a new venture that would next year introduce Best Buy stores and Web sites in Europe. Per the terms of the deal, Best Buy will buy a 50 percent stake in Carphone for $2.1 billion.

Carphone has more than 760 stores across Britain.

With its prepay card effort, Carphone will rely on Metavente for its prepaid and licensed software services and Monitise for the Monilink mobile banking and payments network.

The service will cover mobile management just in the way customers of British banks manage their finances while on the go.

In essence, a secure application on the mobile device will let customers top up their cards directly from their bank account and also monitor recent transaction activity.

Consumers will also be able to move money on and off the prepay card.

Prepay cards work in the same way as a prepaid phone: consumers can only spend up to value of the credit on the card at the time.

Metavente, whose headquarters are in Milwaukee, processes more than 80 million payment cards for consumers in the United States through its distribution partners.