Government prepares dematerialized meal card for students

During a visit to the Crous de Metz university restaurant, Patrick Hetzel, France's Minister of Higher Education, outlined his objectives for improving access to affordable food for students. At the heart of these new measures is a monthly grant from the French government to certain students, in the form of a dematerialized prepaid card.

FACTS

• The French government is therefore planning to launch a new financial aid scheme for students who do not have a Crous or approved restaurant close to where they live (i.e. more than 20 minutes away on foot or by public transport).

• The scheme is designed to help some 100,000 students throughout France.
  It will take the form of a dematerialized prepaid payment card that will be made available to each student and can be used in grocery stores.

• The card will be loaded with a monthly amount of 40 euros for scholarship holders and 20 euros for non-scholarship holders. Students living in the French overseas territories will receive an additional 10 euros.

• The total cost of this measure for 2025 will be 38 million euros.

CHALLENGES

• A large-scale national scheme: 43 million meals were served and more than 500,000 students benefited from the 1 euro rate in the country's nearly 1,000 collective catering outlets over the 2023-2024 school year. However, according to government estimates, there are still 100,000 students in France who struggle to access low-cost catering services due to a lack of proximity to the facilities. The new scheme is designed to fill this gap.

• Respecting the law: The French Minister of Higher Education emphasizes that the launch of this prepaid dematerialized card is part of the implementation of the provisions of the law of April 13, 2023, known as the Levi law, aimed at promoting access for all students to moderately priced catering services in France.

• Defending a national strategy: The launch of this new scheme by the French government underlines its commitment to developing a variety of payment services based on digital and dematerialized offerings. The forthcoming deployment of this service for French students echoes the parallel rollout of the Wero service by the European Payments Initiative (EPI), which aims to offer a cross-border, interoperable and, above all, 100% digital payment service.

MARKET PERSPECTIVE

• This deployment also echoes the strategic efforts currently being made by French banking players to offer meal vouchers pooled with all other employee benefits, and supported by digital tools such as mobile applications. BNP Paribas, for example, is making this promise with Mūcho, as is Crédit Agricole with Worklife.

• The prepaid model, meanwhile, is suited to social welfare payments in general. In France, Upcoop and CB launched a prepaid welfare card last September. It is based on both a physical medium and a dematerialized version to facilitate online purchases.