GiftCard Partners Blog

It should be of no surprise that mobile payment was a choice topic at this year’s Prepaid Expo, but as purveyors of the B2B portion of retail sales; how will we get to mobile payment? Retailers and merchants are living (or about to live) the latest technology and game changing concepts about the consumer waving their mobile device to pay. But the B2B portion of the market still has major issues to overcome. The questions that the Prepaid Expo asks ring loud in order to capture consumers and also ring true for your B2B customers and subsequent end-consumers: What will be frictionless in your environment? What will bring the greatest value? What will be the best authentication? What's the best way to reduce cost? How do you make prepaid product more relevant and valuable to cardholder before, during, after the payment transaction? Interesting quote from Bill Gates about the future: "We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten."--Bill Gates Mobile buying is inevitable, but are you considering B2B gift card sales in your mobile prepaid strategy? If not, when will you shape your change? Read up on the
Prepaid Expo’s Live from Prepaid Expo: The Future of Prepaid & Mobile

Are you running a customer loyalty points program and looking for the right FIT for your customer rewards? Selecting the right gift cards to include in your program goes beyond strong brands and lots of locations. The gift card brands you offer should not only be a category leader, but they should innovate by facilitating a perfect fit for their customers, and in this day-and-age; they should provide social experiences that enhance the buying experience. Last September,
Charming Shoppes launched Fashion Genius™ for Lane Bryant® and its sister brands Catherines®, Fashion Bug® and Sonsi®.  The Fashion Genius™ includes breakthrough “fit and style technology that takes the guesswork out of shopping online, enabling plus size women to turn personalized recommendations into fully styled, head-to-toe outfits.” Now couple that technology leadership with offering a mobile shopping experience which integrates PayPal, adds customer crowd-sourcing and shopper collaboration on social media platforms, and; Charming Shoppes offers your loyalty program participants more than a cutting edge gift card reward, it’s a seamless customer experience. Read more about
Charming Shoppes' Fashion Genius and their latest advancements in social shopping technology.

For many employers, making the connection between “games” at work and increased productivity can be a tough leap to make. But evidence of the success of gamification increasingly piles up and now there are many corporate success trends we can point to. Yet, the term “gamification” and the motivation technique is becoming a cornerstone of corporate and employee incentive programs. Snowfly, an employee recognition and incentive company reports over 2,700,000 hits on Google for the term, over 150 million of their corporate performance games have been played, and they expect gamification to be a 2.8 billion dollar business by 2015.1 In
Snowfly’s 16 Key Findings for Success white paper, they tout that their workplace games have a 93% participant approval rate within incentive and employee performance programs, yet the national approval average for traditional programs hovers around 45%.2 Many more key discoveries and lessons learned can be found in the
white paper. In
Incentive Research Foundation’s (IRF) recent top trends webinar, they list gamification as #4 out of their
12 Trends in Rewards and Recognition for 2012. IRF white paper outlines Gartner Group’s prediction “that by 2015, half of all managed innovation processes will include game mechanics, and that by 2014, 70% of all the Global 2000 organizations will have at least one “gamified application” in place.3 The future seems quite bright for this innovative interactive method of motivating, incenting, and rewarding. Are you using such techniques yet? Sources: 1 & 2:
Gamification after Twelve Years and 150 Million Games: 16 Key Findings for Success 3:
IRF Trends &
Gartner’s report: Gartner Says By 2015, More Than 50 Percent of Organizations That Manage Innovation Processes Will Gamify Those Processes

In less than 2 weeks, GCP’s own Ed Shulkin and Deb Merkin will attend the Prepaid industry's biggest event. They’ll take in host keynotes, sponsors & exhibitions, and info sessions about the latest products and solutions in prepaid technologies and we’ll report the highlights back to you on this blog. Here are some helpful Prepaid Expo links: -        
Download the agenda -        
Check out the executive sessions -        
Prepaid Keynotes -        
What’s in store Check back next week to check out our Prepaid Expo round up.

I had the pleasure of attending the Incentive Research Foundation (IRF) 12 Trends in Rewards & Recognition webinar last week. It was a truly well put together and extremely professional event; I don’t tend to take these attributes for granted these days. And the
post webinar white paper download is filled with survey results, studies, insights, economic climate conditions, mobile technology implications in the workplace, the latest engagement techniques, and so much more. During the webinar, they noted that they’d release 2 new studies about the use of prepaid cards as incentives and rewards and
11 new studies and white papers on the use of rewards, recognition, and motivational meetings in the workplace. Here are IRF’s top 12 Trends, do take the time to download the white paper; it’s a must read for employers involved with engagement, motivation, recognition, and rewards…the things that keep your business ticking!