to get to know customers personally and to serve their needs better. Within a few years, the company had expanded so it could deal with credit cards as well as checks, offering a verification system for people buying on credit. The company had also moved onto the mainland and continued to expand, and as the company did this Melton continued to expand sales and technical staff along with the service so as to provide direct and personal service to the customer. This had indeed been part of his vision for the company when he founded it, and he did everything he could to assure that it continued being so as the company grew and as it added new services and a computer network to verify checks and credit card sales (Hoover's Handbook of Emerging Company, 1993, 362).
A secondary market for company relates to the automated teller machine, a market that has been maturing, and the industry is now waiting for point-of-sale to become a viable payment option. The opening of this new market comes as VeriFone has positioned itself to take advantage of this change to address the new market of prepaid cards, a cash replacement vehicle made popular in Europe and Japan. The method is typically used for high volume, low value purchases, and prepaid cards allow consumers to add value to a card for use in a closed environment, such as a college campus or a company cafeteria. Like debit cards, value is automatically deducted from the card at the point of sale, but there is no connection to the user's demand deposit account. A number of systems integrators provide their clients with a total system made up of different vendors' products, and they have found success in the prepaid market on U.S. college campuses. Today, both systems integrators and independent vendors, such as VeriFone, are beginning to branch out, and VeriFone first announced its prepaid card product line at the National Automatic Merchandising Association convention in 1990. The n...