GPA has been in telecom going back to the early 80's starting out in the 1+ long distance business where they acted as Master Agents and National Brokers for companies like MCI, AT&T and Cable & Wireless. Through the late 80's and early 90's they market various "products du jour" offered by the industry. Acting as cellular agents for BellSouth Cellular (now Cingular), paging for Arch Communications and one of the first distributors of Internet services for Prodigy.

In 1995, they began following the progress of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and recognized the opportunity in the deregulation of local dial tone. As soon as the Act was signed into law, they began searching for a product to offer their customers. In the earliest days of the CLEC industry there were only a few CAP's offering service and we represented companies like Brooks Fiber (now MCI), ACSI (now eSpire), TCG (now AT&T) offering an alternative to the LEC's and were very successful in getting thousands of small and mid-size businesses to switch their local service from the Bell companies to the new Competitive Local Exchange Carriers. By 1998, they had grown their revenues to a healthy level and felt they had enough experience, understanding and customer base to start work on a plan to transition from a Master Agent to a licensed carrier.

In 1998, GPA has moved into the prepaid segment of telecom and expanded it's wholesale offerings to include private label programs for national retailers and promotional cards for Fortune 500 type companies. We also provide switch partitioning for wholesale distributors and pure usage, first use and pin programs. GPA has evolved into a mature distribution company offering products and services on a wholesale, direct to retail and consumer level via the Internet.

Since 2000, GPA has been a leading provider of payment processing services for prepaid and cash payment transactions. Our technologies support the real-time delivery of prepaid services to retailers' point-of-sale (POS) systems, kiosks or ATM networks. With GPA's transaction solutions, merchant processors, acquirers, and prepaid distributors can manage their entire category of prepaid services including wireless, long distance, wireless content, bill-pay and stored value programs on a single transaction platform that resides on the retailer's existing terminals, point of sale systems, or the GPA Virtual transaction network.

Informed by several major insights about the cash economy--and the suppliers, consumers, and support industries around the globe who make up the marketplace known as prepaid services Ð GPA has launched several standard-setting technologies and supporting services that bring prepaid to the retail marketplace on a large and manageable scale. GPA also provisions all products and has introduced a continuing set of supply-side improvements that further enhance the value proposition for our clients.