GiftCard Partners Blog

Can't find your wallet as you are running to the store?  Soon, this will be no problem, as long as you can find your smartphone.  Google will soon be launching "Google Wallet," an application that turns Smartphones (starting only with certain Android powered phones) into mobile payment systems.  The technology will use NFC (near field communication) technology to allow consumers to pay for purchases, receive special offers, and administer loyalty and rewards programs.  So does this new technology bring online customers offline, or offline customers online...let us know what you think! For more information on the l
aunch of Google Wallet, click here.

A new study by the Obama administration caught our attention; among other important statistics, it states that females earn about 75% of what their male counterparts make. Although employers “need to treat men and women equally”, when it comes to compensation, it’s just not going to happen overnight. However, handling employee engagement, recognition, incentives and rewards in a way that is engaging to women…MIGHT be keeping you up at night. Recognizing performance differently for women than men is a sticky topic, but employers do need to provide incentives and rewards that are relevant to women and which speak directly to their likes, needs, and wishes. An example of this is to buy gift cards in bulk and offer card brands that catch the attention of the woman, the mom, the professional (see below).

At GiftCard Partners, we follow gift card technology closely and we’ve been doing some trend reporting on e-Gift cards (aka eCerts & virtual gift cards), mobile Gift cards (aka mCerts), and their place in
virtual wallets (see last week’s post:
Virtual Wallets: What are they…Really?). These technologies affect our clients (retailers) as they navigate through their adoption of technology across their retail locations, ecommerce sites, and in their B2B or bulk gift card business. It also affects our customers, as they receive their cards and deliver them to their end user differently. The end users, who receive the cards as part of workplace incentive programs or loyalty rewards, receive their cards fast and can use them with optimal convenience.  Here, let’s take notice of yet another party that benefits from this technology…Mother Earth. In E-Gift Cards Pushing Out Plastic Credit, Earth911 highlights that implementing e-Gift card technology reduces the industry’s carbon footprint and “spares natural resources by offering retail credit via online delivery”. Decomposition resistant plastic card resins, laminates, inks & dyes combined with packaging and fuel for shipping…all are eliminated by technologists and the retail industries’ movement to Go Green with gift cards. Also consider that gift cards are just a tiny slice of the overall plastic and paper pie, if you add up all the payment methods that could eventually reside in a virtual wallet. Although consumer purchased gift cards were the first to go “e”, we are also seeing a strong migration in the more complicated to fulfill and distribute, B2B market. More than ½ of our clients already offer technology based gift cards and another ¼ of them are in the process now. As more retailers adopt non-plastic gift card methods, companies like
CashStarTM,
RevTrax® and
Transaction WirelessTM lead the way to provide critical pieces to make B2B bulk corporate gift cards widely available. Until our wallets are all virtual, encourage your cards’ recipients to recycle their used gift cards here:

Visit Alison Neumer Lara's Earth911 article.

It’s un-debatable that more employers than ever are starting health and wellness initiatives since the inception of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). There are tax benefits for employers who offer health and wellness programs and we’ve seen lots of studies about how incentives like gift cards for success compliment these programs by driving interest, engaging participants, while boosting benefits packages and lowering health care costs.

But, the most important (and complex) question: Are employers really building healthier minds and bodies, while also increasing productivity? What about for the long term? A recent survey of more than 30,000 Ceridian LifeWorks participants presents us with a “YES!!”, via these results¹:

It isn’t new for us to hear that prepaid cards are great motivators and incentives. But a new loyalty and prepaid survey reveals just how much prepaid has affected consumer spending habits and long term adoption when used in the B2B space as incentives. Here, we outline some of the most interesting tidbits and pair them with our market observations and viewpoints. Let us know your thoughts via the comments field.