Job Title
President
Company
Home Depot Incentives, Inc.
Company Type
Retailer
Tenure at Firm
5 Years

What is your job title, and what are you responsible for? I am the President of Home Depot Incentives, Inc. I manage The Home Depot’s gift card company, a multi-billion dollar retail enterprise with multiple channels of distribution across North America, including direct to consumer and business-to-business programs.

Describe your biggest challenges, both short-term and long-term.Optimizing my company’s growth in the business-to-business incentives market is our greatest opportunity long-term. When business customers hear that 9 out of 10 people shopped at The Home Depot in the last 6 months and that 43% of disposable income is spent on home improvement, it makes it much easier for me to sell them gift cards. My challenge in the short-term is getting that message to as many decision-makers as possible in a timely and relevant way, thus creating the biggest opportunity. The good news is, we’ve heard from our corporate partners time and again that employees want The Home Depot gift cards as part of their incentive programs. A gift card to The Home Depot plays to employees’ and clients’ emotional attachment to their homes – in a nutshell, it’s a gift they actually want.

What is the most innovative prepaid card program you’ve seen or heard about in the last year? Last Christmas, The Home Depot developed a portfolio of religious-based gift cards that were sold through the retail channels. It was a courageous act, given the potential for criticism. However, our research showed that there is a segment of the population that absolutely loves and values these cards. The sell-through we observed of these cards reinforced that consumer sentiment.

Describe how prepaid will fit into your industry in five years. My belief is that prepaid will be both one of our primary forms of tender as well as an important way of driving incremental sales. Its level of importance will likely be on the level of retailer-issued credit cards.

If you weren’t working in the prepaid sector, what would you be doing and why? I tell my team that I have a love affair with the consumer. My passion is managing businesses by understanding what customers need and, through innovation and creative problem solving, delivering a winning value proposition. I actually went to medical school but decided against being a doctor because of the lack of teamwork and creativity.