GiftCard Partners Blog

Last week GiftCard Partners’ senior management attended the 2013 Innovation Project at Harvard University, an annual summit that focuses on payment innovation from all angles. Payments experts spoke, including government leaders like Rosie Rios, Treasurer of the United States, and Raj Date, CEO of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, as did  payments industry leaders such as Steve Levitt author of Freakonomics, and Don Kingsborough, CEO of Pay Pal.

Since gift cards are given as gifts, incentives and employee rewards, they are often thought of by retailers and merchants as a customer acquisition tool. Let’s say a customer doesn’t shop at a particular retailer or merchant often or at all. Yet a family member, friend or employer gives a particular brand based on it meshing well with the recipients’ needs. This gift card now becomes a new customer acquisition tool or a customer loyalty tool for the retailer. BUT, are retailers also thinking of their own gift cards as a tool to lower operating costs? When your customers use debit and credit cards for their purchases, the burden of the transaction fees falls on that retailer. There are no fees when your customers utilize their closed-loop gift cards in your own name. The impressive numbers add up when you think of the difference your gift cards can make when selling them by the hundreds and thousands in the B2B market. GiftCard Partners’s customers buy multi-millions of dollars in face value gift cards annually across all our retail brands. Those are all consumers using your gift cards versus credit or debit payment card options that rack up fees charged to you. Check out
First Data’s Perspective: The Evolution of Gift Card Strategy to see how retailers and merchants are re-evaluating their cost of payment acceptance at their POS locations.

Retail TouchPoints (RTP) is an excellent source for retail executives to stay apprised of insightful content around the latest in customer-facing technologies and the development of critical customer loyalty strategies to compete in today’s retail environment. In RTP’s
Top 20 Articles of 2011; they outline top 20 most viewed articles of last year and review the top trends across those most read stories. They noted that the majority of the most viewed articles were case studies with success stories from leading retailers, highlighting that “retail executives are looking to learn from their peers….two of the hot-button topics in 2011 were mobile technology and social commerce.” I hesitate to simply lead you to the list. First, I must note that the top article is
10 Innovative Solutions In The First Annual Next-Gen Retail Awards Report; an important composition of innovative solutions highlighted at the 2011 National Retail Federation (NRF) Annual Convention. The innovations profiled in the report included 10 categories like: social media; in-store marketing; inventory management; store intelligence; mobile technology; customer engagement; POS, and cross-channel. “In a challenging economy retailers are struggling to turn shoppers into brand advocates. With that in mind, customer loyalty was a hot topic in 2011.” Visit the full list of Top 20 Retail TouchPoints articles and you can also access the actual articles, insights, case studies and more to start your own innovative approaches.

Adopting new technologies as important as your wallet isn’t as easy as Google saying “NOW…GO!”. Embracing a mobile wallet also isn’t just about spending on your credit cards, it’s about embracing technology to spend the money you already have, on prepaid cards like all those gift cards we received for the holidays. Fraud is also on the minds of consumers, bulk gift card givers, retailers, and merchants. So, what will facilitate the use of mobile prepaid on the technology and consumer sides? Check out this series of interviews from the
PREPAID EXPO with Jonathan Treiber of RevTrax.

Who doesn’t love a great historical overview of the payments industry? OK, perhaps it’s not a favorite read, but how about in the form of an infographic? Check out this depiction of transactions from 9,000 BC, continuing throughout the history of personal and business transactions. Cattle, cowries, wampum beads, gold…right up to preset day technology.  We’re surprised that gift cards aren’t displayed here, since they are a gifted form of payment, or
in the case of Scrip – simply a retailer-specific form of payment…but perhaps that’s too detailed for such a graphic. Let us know what you think…is the future, implants? Source:
http://www.flowtown.com/blog/

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