St James House warns of delays to pre-paid card programme and merchant traffic services

Technology company St James House warned on Tuesday that both its pre-paid card programme and the onboarding of new merchant traffic were running behind schedule.

While no cards had been issued to end-users as of yet, St James said it was making "good progress" with the roll out of new services for EUR, GBP and USD based accounts and noted that it had received many account applications for pre-paid cards and hopes to issue as many as 20,000 cards by the end of November.

The AIM-listed group said its merchant services unit had seen an increase in applications after the return from the summer break; however, no traffic was currently being processed due to issues with clients added during July and August.

St James said its lottery business remained on track to provide a positive operating contribution to the group in the second half of the trading year.

Chief executive Graeme Paton said: "We are disappointed that the pre-paid card programme and the onboarding of new merchant traffic are both running behind schedule, but we remain confident that they will be successful.

"However, we have not been sitting still and have made operational progress in a number of areas."

As of 1105 BST, St James had sunk 13.79% to 50p.