Blackhawk Gift Card Summit 2014
Blackhawk Network, Inc. is a leading prepaid and payments network, which supports the program management and the physical and digital distribution of a large range of prepaid products.
Blackhawk Network utilizes proprietary technology to provide consumers a wide selection of gift cards, prepaid telecom handsets, airtime cards and general purpose reloadable cards across a global network totalling more than 180,000 locations worldwide.
This year’s Blackhawk Australian Gift Card Summit was held in Melbourne, with President of Blackhawk Talbott Roche & President of Kroger, of one of the top 5 retailers, Kathleen Kelly as the keynote speakers. The attendees consisted of the top tier FMCG retailers in Australia as well as the Blackhawk affiliated gift card processors, with Conn3cted as the Technical Partners for Blackhawk Network Australia.
The Summit was a success with great insight on the trends for gift cards for the rest of 2014. Kathleen Kelly spoke to the statistics of physical gift carding in the USA and the new gift card ‘end caps’ that were showcased at the summit with the potential for Australian retailers to follow suit.
The most innovative topic came from PayPal with the 2015 buzzword, ‘Frictionless Payment.’ The software that will soon be in production is the PayPal frictionless wallet that will allow retailers and consumers, through WiFi and location based app’s, to purchase and redeem goods via the PayPal App in a quick and seamless way.
Overall, this was a great opportunity for all partners and alliances to come together and share the latest trends and technology for the future of gift cards in Australia.