GiftCard Partners Blog

A great post from Prepaid Expo; they outline some interesting financial prepaid stats, usages, mobile stats  and more. Interesting information about the decline in use of cash; this is a fact that employers can keep in mind when planning employee incentives and rewards. Prepaid and gift cards aren’t just as good as cash…they ARE cash and loaded on mobile devices, they are the cash of the future! Here are the tidbits most interesting to us, click below for the whole shebang: - $82 billion. That's the amount expected to be loaded onto Prepaid cards in 2012. - Consumers are using prepaid cards as a way to access wages, direct deposits increased by nearly 70% in 2011. - Mobile POS payments is expected to grow from $362.6 million in 2011 to $1.4 billion in 2017. - The use of cash is predicted to decline 3% a year until 2015, through 2015, the use of cash will decline by nearly $200 billion. - Cash point-of-sale purchases is expected to drop to 23% by 2017.
More interesting stats from Prepaid Expo

What do organizations like the Soldier Family Assistance Center, the Fisher Houses, the Mologne House, the Navy Lodge, the Red Cross, and the Bethesda Causality Affairs Office all have in common? They are working with Operation Gift Card to give back to the men and women who have given so much for our country. Donations of $71,000 in gift certificates and special group product donations have been delivered by these organizations for both wounded troops and their families. Operation Gift Cards began in October of 2005 and in the past 7 years has also sent 6,810 thank you kits, containing $136,000 in military store gift certificates to our wounded soldiers. For more information on this amazing organization or to learn how you can send a ‘Thank You’ to our troops, visit
Operation Gift Cards. GiftCard Partners sells gift cards in bulk and offers discounts to organizations like Operation Gift Card every day. If you are interested in sending a bulk gift card order to Operation Gift Card,
contact us today!

The first quarter of 2012 included GCP’s visits to and participation in many meetings, conferences and events, including the PrePaid
Expo, the InComm Partner Alliance, the South Florida Success Expo (SWFL), and the Loyalty Expo. In Q1’s trend report, we captured a pulse on 2011 B2B gift card sales results, key gift card market expansion trends for 2012, and an update on the effects of New Jersey’s gift card laws to our industry.
Read the full B2B Gift Card Trend Report here.      

Thank you to the Prepaid Expo for bringing us this interesting infographic, which was commissioned by CoreCard®. The History of Prepaid Infographic highlights the progression of Prepaid, starting in the 1970’s and heading into predictions for 2013. The future of prepaid is not just about spending and consumerism; prepaid will thrive in government and healthcare sectors via benefit payment programs.

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