GiftCard Partners Blog

The GCP staff is excited for all the insights, collaboration and networking to be had at the upcoming 12^th annual IMA Executive Summit 2011, August 7-9. The theme: Learn, Connect, Benchmark and Deb Merkin, Ed Shulkin, Melina Balboni and Diane Freeland will be on-hand at the event.

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 undisputable that gift cards are the workplace incentive of choice. Here are the answers to a few questions we are hearing around using gift cards as incentives or rewards for workplace safety programs.

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.