Anyone like me, who once signed up for a Paddy Power Cash Card+, will have gotten an email the other day alerting them that the cards are being discontinued.
This means that there is only a short time left in which funds can be loaded onto them, before they will become redundant and people who don’t read their emails will be asking what happened to them.
These bookie cards were once all the rage, bridging the gap between the slow withdrawal times or even withdrawal fees of yesterday, and the fee free super fast withdrawals we enjoy today.
They all had their own extra quirks and benefits from bookmaker to bookmaker, but most were more or less the same. Paddy Power did things a little bit differently though.
This was not unusual for the Irish brand back then, they were known for carving out their own path, and the Paddy Power Cash Card+ was another example of that.
It’s evidently not something that many people are still using though, because as of the 26th of March this year, the cards are history.
Remaining customers can load cash onto the cards until then, but after that they will only be able to spend any money already on the card, and when that is gone, the card becomes useless and should be destroyed.
What was the Paddy Power Cash Card+?
It was a good idea at the time.
Paddy Power had a couple of different cards you could sign up to.
One was much like the cards other bookies ran, allowing punters to connect their online account with their real world cash. So you could transfer money between the website and your pocket via the card, allowing for instant withdrawals in cash using the shops and vice verser.
What Paddy Power did with their Cash Card+ though was not matched by any other bookie.
This was a card you could actually use in shops. It was a debit card for all intents and purposes, but you could load it u directly from your betting account, so if you had a win you could stick it on your Cash Card+ and use it in the pub, the supermarket, the cinema, whatever.
I used to enjoy checking my weekend bets on a Sunday evening, transferring any winnings over to my Cash Card+, then spending it on posh food on my lunch break.
Greggs is posh, right?
Anyway, I haven’t used it for ages because withdrawals became so much quicker, and I’ve stopped betting with Paddy Power too – they aren’t the bookie they used to be in my opinion, but that’s another story.
The fact that the cards are being scrapped shows that i’m not the only one.
Why is the Cash Card Plus Being Scrapped?
I would guess at lack of use.
Bookies only ever run these sorts of schemes for publicity, or because they think it helps them retain customers and get new ones, or makes their own lives easier.
Well, if the Cash Card Plus is no longer something that punters find interesting, then it’s not worth Paddy Power running it.
They had an arrangement with Mastercard in order to provide the cards, which was perhaps costing them money, and if the uptake had dropped off it would just not have been worth the expense.
It’s also perhaps to do with the way Paddy Power has been changing in recent years. They have become more corporate, and could even be considered bland in comparison to the innovation being shown by other brands.
Paddy Power has been losing its’ once famous sense of individuality for years, ever since it merged with Betfair and then became part of Flutter, and the brand is fast becoming just another boring bookie.
They were once famous for novelty bets, comical advertising campaigns, and innovation around betting lines, promotions, and features, but all of that seems to have been stripped away.
The Cash Card+ is just one more aspect that made them unique which is now a thing of the past.