Travel to Far-east and East European countries are picking up this summer, says T.C.Guruprasad, CEO & Managing Director, CentrumDirect Ltd, a leading player in foreign exchange, global visas, travel and tours. The company is a subsidiary of Centrum Capital Ltd.

Speaking on the trends in travel, Guruprasad said that travellers are increasingly moving towards prepaid cards in order to benefit from forex rates that are close to prevailing market trends. Travellers, for instance, find difficulty in getting dollars currently even at Rs 61 to the dollar which is about 2 per cent higher than the market rate. This is taken care of when prepaid cards are used (since they are issued at close to interbank rates). Apart from the rates, these cards also carry a security feature – they are chip-based and comes with a back-up card (so there is no fear of being stranded abroad without any credit). Mr Guruprasad said that there was a 27 per cent growth in card volumes for CentrumDirect year on year. About half a million cards have been issued so far. The company is present in 43 cities with about 90 outlets across the country and covering four airports (Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai and Baghdora (Siliguri).

Speaking on forex prepaid card trends, Guruprasad said that the CentrumDirect would be issuing cards on its own through an online portal. Currently, it does it through a couple of banks by virtue of being an Authorised Dealer (Category 2). The company has launched a card carnival (with incentive schemes for agents) aimed at converting cash to card – or getting more retail participants and benefiting customers in terms of pricing and security. Currently the card business is more towards institutional clients. The market size for prepaid forex cards is around $2 billion, Guruprasad said. About 70% of this gets spent abroad while the rest is exchanged back in India.

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