GiftCard Partners Blog

We have talked a lot about employee health and wellness programs on this blog in the past, but according to a recent
USA Today article, there is a new type of employee health program gaining popularity among employers. Employee financial health is a new priority for employers and it is having a real impact on employee productivity. The main premise for employee financial education is that if there is no financial stress in employees' lives, they can be at the peak of productivity. Three main goals for employee financial health initiatives are:

Financial incentives have become an organizational norm.  Paying employees based on their contributions has become a fairly standard practice in every business.  It has also become something that employees have grown to expect, especially high level executives.  But how can an employee trust a incentive plan where executives are achieving financial rewards while lower-level employees have gone without pay raises for significant periods of time? Employees that do not trust a financial incentive plan, or the way the plan is run, will be unhappy with it no matter how much the plan pays out.  Incentive plans that have no link to performance can have an extremely negative impact on a corporation.  An incentive can only work if the person who is receiving the incentive can affect their performance. To make things simple, Hay Group has distilled all the research they've done around incentive pay into the table below:

We are two weeks away from the 2014 All Payments Expo that will take place at The Mirage in Las Vegas this year. As regular attendees of the event, the GiftCard Partners team is looking forward to seeing both new and returning faces in the payments industry and speaking with new loyalty, incentive and payment companies who can use gift cards as part of their reward complement. The APEX brings together Alternative Financial Services, Emerging Payments, Omnichannel Retail Strategies and Prepaid all in one location to focus on areas of growth and convergence in payments. Check out more on the APEX
here.

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