Netspend offers a wide range of benefits and conveniences to users. One of the benefits users can enjoy when using the Netspend prepaid card is people do not have to go through complicated application processes such as a credit check which is required for a credit card application. Some people might want to know if they have to provide their social security number to get approved for debit cards. Let’s find out.
Does Netspend require a social security number?
The answer is yes. Although the amount of personal information required to provide to get the Netspend debit card is smaller than that for credit cards, it still requires personal details such as your social security number.
What are other details required to provide?
In addition to your social security number, there are more details you need to share:
- Your full name
- Address and zip code
- Email address
- Date of birth
- Depending on the product you use, there can be more.
When you apply for a new card, no minimum balance is required to open an account in Netspend. When your application successfully went through, you can start accessing the benefits of Netspend.
Netspend benefits
Let’s have a look at the Netspend benefits.
Prepaid Cards
The main service of Netspend is a prepaid debit card. Since it is a prepaid card, Netspend uses simpler policies for approving card applications and does not require the complicated steps (and credit score check) that you will go through for a credit card as we learned above. Also, no activation fee is applied. For the monthly fee, check this table on the Netspend website.
Besides the easy application process, there are more features.
- Direct Deposit: You can create a direct deposit account to add money to your Netspend prepaid card. This will be the fastest transfer option since a payment arrives up to 2 business days faster. You can link your Netspend deposit account to various payment sources as below.
- Paychecks from work
- Tax refunds
- Social Security benefits
- Pensions
- SSI, or Supplemental Security Income
- Railroad Retirement Benefits
- Defense Finance and Accounting Service Payments
- Unemployment benefits from your state (different by state)
- and more
- Mobile Account: Just like other online banking from other financial institutions, you can use your smartphone to access your Netspend account. The app will let you check your balance and see your account details as well as send and receive money. The app can find you the nearest reloading locations using your geolocation. Recently, Netspend has added a new image recognition feature that takes a photo of your check and uses the scanned detail to automatically deposit the check into your account.
- Anytime Alerts: You can get notified about transactions via email or text message. You can use this to receive an alert when a paycheck becomes available in your account. Or, you can set it to notify you when a spending limit is reached. What’s more interesting is that you can interact with Anytime Alerts via text message. Send a text message, “BAL”, to receive your balance detail via SMS. If you want to find out the nearest loading location, simply send “RELOAD”.
In terms of fee plans, there are two options – Monthly Plan and Pay-As-You-Go Plan. If you want unlimited transactions, get paid by Direct Deposit, or/and use the prepaid card often, Monthly Plan will be suitable for you. That plan has a fixed monthly rate no matter how often you use it. If you don’t use it often and make fewer transactions, you will be better off with Pay-As-You-Go.
Business Solutions
If you are a small business owner, Netspend provides the following convenient features.
- Small Business Prepaid Mastercard: One of the advantages of prepaid cards is money management. When you run a business and want to use a card that has a limit, a prepaid card can be a great option to control spending. If you need to have and manage more than one prepaid card, Netspend gives you a way to manage in one place. This feature can be useful for tax time.
- Incentive: There is no more rewarding way than paying your employees. Using a single access point feature, you can load the same or different amounts to prepaid cards of your staff members. You can even design prepaid cards with your company’s brand on them.
- Tip Network: This allows companies to distribute tips to their staff without having to pre-fund the amount. Using Tip Network, you can pay out today’s tip right away and you pay back the amount to Netspend within 2 days.
- Paycard (Skylight PayOptions): Paycard allows you to simply manage payroll payments and remove the need to write paper checks. You can centrally control payroll by using the Skylight Corporate Portal.
- Expense Management: One merit of using prepaid cards is that you can control expenses by topping up a limited amount of money. By this, you can prevent your business expenses from going out of control.
Wrapping up
As part of the application process, you need to provide social security number or government-issued identification number. In addition, you are required to share basic personal details. Except for these, getting a new Netspend card is easy and fast.
If you want to know more about Netspend, check the following articles.
