Job Title
CEO
Company
Giftex Prepay
Company Type
Publisher
Tenure at Firm
4 Years

What is your job title, and what are you responsible for? CEO, responsible for maximizing shareholder value. I support the team as we try to keep all our stakeholders happy, all of the time. Giftex Prepay is a knowledge and networking company that provides independent intelligence in prepay around the world for companies like Home Depot, First Data, Sainsbury’s, Accor and Travel Tags.

Describe your biggest challenges, both short-term and long-term. People in prepay are hungry. They are hungry to learn, hungry to discover how to make their target ROI, to get promoted, or simply, to survive. Our opportunity is to satisfy this hunger by providing intelligence on customers, markets, models and technology. We do this through publications such as our journal, Global Prepay Intelligence, or The Guide to Gift Cards and Guide to Prepay. We also do this by running the Giftex Prepay Network, our exclusive group of leaders in prepay from North America, Europe and Australia.

Our biggest short term challenge is predicting which way the market is going to go. Demand for gift cards is still steaming ahead, as we predicted based on our consumer research. But demand for prepay cards is strong in some areas, and faltering in others. Our core business involves continuous research of consumers to help identify how companies should best invest in this area.

What is the most innovative prepaid card program you’ve seen or heard about in the last year? In the US, Subway’s loyalty-enhancing closed loop program is head and shoulders ahead of the rest in terms of how it increases customer profitability. Using a simple combination of a convenience card and a loyalty card, Carman Wenkoff, President of ValuePay Services, has spent five years developing a unique capability a prepay platform overlaid with a proprietary CRM capability. As the program is rolled out across their 28,000 franchised stores, the dollars are rolling in.

Where do you see the pre-paid industry in the next ten years? I wish I was able to be as positive as many prepay people about the future of prepay. But I’ve studied what customers say. Prepay can solve a myriad of problems, for sure, from gifting to remittance to on-line to sub-prime. But unless the value customers get from solving a problem using prepay is greater than the cost of changing to and using it, they will not switch. In ten years time, therefore, some prepay applications will be central to the way people pay. Others will have disappeared without trace. The winners? Gift, loyalty-convenience, sub-prime, remittance and insurance.

If you weren’t working in the prepaid sector, what would you be doing and why? Riding my bike through the mountains. I’m hoping to do the Race Across America, ‘The world’s toughest bike race’, in 2009, 3,000 miles in ten days. If I get the above prediction wrong, I promise to do it twice.