Greetings! As you can see from my bio line, I work as a product manager for UniPay Gateway at United Thinkers.In theory, payment processors can actually use payment cards (and not bank accounts) to pay out customers, however, there is a question: how to implement this from technological viewpoint. Plus there is a catch mentioned by Kilian Thalhammer in his answer.Technically, a processor could perform refunds (payouts) to a card specified by the customer (buyer, cardholder). However, at the time the customeru2019s card is funded, interchange fee is also returned. So, in the extreme case when some merchant account serves only for refunds (and not for sales), this acount will have to be serviced by the processor/acquirer for free, and the processor will get no revenues from interchange payments. Such an account will be unprofitable in the eyes of card network and the acquiring bank.Moreover, processing of refund transactions through Visa and MC networks is associated with significant cost for the processor.The alternative solution implemented by some processors is usage of prepaid cards. If someone has a prepaid card, there are two options to use it:Some account may be associated with the prepaid card, once the funds are transferred to the account, they automatically get to the card,Prepaid card issuer may have an API allowing to transfer money to the card in real time.In both cases there is no additional cost for the processor in case of refunds. In the first case the cardholder gets the funds transferred to the card instead of the bank account. In the second case it is just the indirect infrastructure (API maintenance-related) cost that should be considered.