Point-of-sale tech firm Ingenico has teamed up with gift card technology company Diggecard.
The partnership, announced Tuesday (Sept. 19), makes Diggecard’s services available on PPaaS, Ingenico’s cloud Payments Platform as a Service. The companies said in a news release that the collaboration also coincides with PPaaS adding gift card services to its platform.
By working with Ingenico, Diggecard co-founder Kristian Stølen said, “we can offer an industry-leading gift card solution not only to large enterprises, but also to small and medium businesses which have traditionally been underserved in the gift card space because of the difficulty and cost of providing robust services at scale.”
According to the release, the PPaaS gift card offering lets payments and commerce services combine seamlessly. With Diggecard, customers will get a range of physical and digital gift card operations at the point of sale.
“By removing the complexity of integration for acquirers, PPaaS opens gift card programs to new categories of retailers, helping to generate new revenue streams and improve consumer engagement,” the release said.
The partnership is happening when businesses are dealing with a persistent problem with gift cards: they are often lost or forgotten.
“Often, recipients stow away these cards in their wallets or purses, unintentionally overlooking them amidst the accumulation of their belongings over time, resulting in these once-considerate gifts going untouched,” PYMNTS wrote last week.
“Expiration dates on specific gift cards only worsen the situation, placing recipients at risk of forfeiting the card’s value.”
In addition, even when recipients use some of the gift card’s value, they don’t spend all of it, leaving substantial fractions unused.
And in some cases, stores go out of business or shut down locations, making it impossible for recipients to redeem their gift cards, leading to more frustration with this prevalent issue.
Speaking with PYMTS earlier this year, Prizeout CEO David Metz said that while there’s a popular belief that gift cards are “free money” for merchants, the reality is much different.
If a gift card is not used after a period of several years (the time frame varies from state to state), the merchant must pay the value of the card back to the state.
“It’s considered lost property,” said Metz. “It actually sits on a liability on the books for the merchant.”
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