Payment Processing: What technologies and systems power gift cards?
Payments
Asked by Question Bot04/May/20151 answer
1 Answer
F
Faisal Khan
Answered 04/May/2015
Its the very same as that of debit/credit cards. The same analogy of credit (or balance check) is applied towards these cards. Because Gift cards don't have to run through and qualify the hoops of compliance and risk like say traditional credit cards, this makes the software less expensive and much less complicated. Their are many solutions in the market.
To be able to run a system, you don't need to invest in say CTL or Card400 systems. Solutions as low as US$ 5,000-10,000 are there in the market to cater to the needs of most clients.
Card printing is essentially numerical based and mapped to database with activation PINs and in turn associating those card numbers and PINs to an account. The activation process itself can be overly simple (i.e open packet and use) or provide KYC information and then activate.
Depending on how the closed loop system is setup (universally all gift cards / loyalty cards are closed loop) redemption or use of the card is on a closed network. The channel may be the traditional POS (with the correct alignment to route transaction to the gift card software) or over TCP/IP, which today is the preferred method.
To be able to run a system, you don't need to invest in say CTL or Card400 systems. Solutions as low as US$ 5,000-10,000 are there in the market to cater to the needs of most clients.
Card printing is essentially numerical based and mapped to database with activation PINs and in turn associating those card numbers and PINs to an account. The activation process itself can be overly simple (i.e open packet and use) or provide KYC information and then activate.
Depending on how the closed loop system is setup (universally all gift cards / loyalty cards are closed loop) redemption or use of the card is on a closed network. The channel may be the traditional POS (with the correct alignment to route transaction to the gift card software) or over TCP/IP, which today is the preferred method.