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Giift is a loyalty marketplace where loyalty programs (points, miles, rewards, gift cards) can be tracked, issued and exchanged. Giift features 20,000 loyalty programs in more than 50 countries, representing companies across most industry segments: airlines, hospitality, F&B, utilities, bank, insurance. To find out more about the company, we interviewed Pascal Xatart, Co-Founder and Director at Giift:
Q: How would you describe Giift?
A: Giift is a loyalty marketplace, were program issuers (airlines, hotels, retailers, businesses in general) enable their points, rewards, gift cards to be exchanged against other programs. They pick up their partner programs, their countries, and Giift processes the exchange.
Q: What is their interest in doing so?
A: Their first interest is to make their own program appealing again. In the US, there is an average of 21 program per household, but only 44% are active! And more than 50% of users complain of inability to redeem rewards.
And by making their programs members happy gain, they increase their loyalty and develop more sales.
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Q: What other interest do they have?
A: For many large programs, unredeemed points, miles, gift cards seat on their balance sheet as a liability (bank points for instance, or frequent flyer air miles). So Giift enables them to improve their redemption by setting the redemption rates they want. Their balance sheets improves, and their members are happy…everybody wins.
Q: How many programs can be accessed in Giift marketplace?
A: Giift marketplace was featuring 20,000 loyalty programs at the end of 2017, located in more than 55 countries. Our objective is to reach 100,000 programs within 2 years.
Q: And how many business clients? What do they look for from Giift?
A: We have 15,000 business clients, primarily SMEs, but also airlines, banks, payment providers, F&B and hotels.
Our primary solution is our Loyalty Exchange solution, but we also bundle it with our Loyalty Issuing solution (we create a program and “leverage” it into our marketplace). In Asia and China, we also market our Loyalty Payment solution, which bundles mobile payment (WeChat, Alipay) with points issuing and point exchange.
Q: Where do you operate?
A: We are global, with operations in the US (NY), in China (Wuhan), in Europe (London), in South East Asia (Singapore) and in Africa (Nairobi), We are planning to expand to the Middle East and the Caribbean’s in 2018. Our development teams are based in the US and China.
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Q: Is it a big market?
A: The outstanding value of miles, points, gift cards, rewards is above $750bn, so this is 30x Bitcoin market size. And every day, this market increases.
Q: What’s next on Giift road map?
A: We are integrating blockchain technology into our exchange platform, which would open amazing loyalty exchange opportunities….
