Taking Gift Cards (truly) Digital By Alan Smith The evolution from paper gift vouchers is ongoing despite the world moving to electronic payment methods. Retailers would love to move away from costly (and risky) paper, but in these tough times they can’t afford to turn customers away so they endure the very manual processing of paper still today. Many retailers with their own proprietary gift solutions claim to be digital and on the face of it they are. Just look at the restaurant sector where self-purchase of digital gift codes is booming (with the incentive of a discount of course). In many cases the customer receives their code and then PRINTS IT! There ends the digital journey. Even if the customer takes the environmentally friendly approach and show the waiter the code on their phone – what does the waiter then proceed to do? Write down the code to take back to the Point of Sale. Another digital journey ends. All the digital gifting solutions available today are proprietary to each retailer on their own systems. Customers are increasingly moving to multi-retail gift cards and most customers still choose to redeem in a physical retail store. To enable multi-retailer gift cards to have a truly end-to-end digital journey the existing infrastructures created by the payments and mobile handset providers needs to be utilised. No retailer would consider integrating to a new infrastructure just for gift cards. This would seem simple of course if the gift card travelled on the rails of one of the major schemes and used established NFC wallets from the mobile handset providers. However, what the card scheme and the mobile providers found was whilst gift cards are similar to a standard card – there are many differences to overcome.