Moneris, DimpleDough Form Gift Card Partnership

A partnership Moneris Solutions Corp. formed recently with DimpleDough Inc.  to resell DimpleDough’s online card-customization technology to Canadian retailers takes advantage of the growing popularity of personalizing closed-loop prepaid cards and sending them as gifts to friends, relatives and business associates, observers say.
As part of a licensing agreement announced Jan. 5, the Toronto-based payments processor became a valued-added reseller of DimpleDough’s technology and developed a dedicated Web site for client merchants and other retailers. Moneris, which serves 350,000 retailers in Canada, links the Web site with those of participating retailers.
Consumers may log on to a participating merchant’s Web site and navigate to Moneris’ Cardtailor.com site to purchase and personalize reloadable gift cards, says Malcolm Fowler, senior vice president and general manager of Ernex, a Burnaby, British Columbia-based division of Moneris that offers prepaid gift cards.
Consumers may use a photograph or a several-line message to personalize their cards, he says. They select a template, upload a photograph from their computer or from Ernex’s image archive, adjust the photograph and preview the card. The process takes less than 10 minutes.
Ernex prints the cards and mails them to the recipients, says Fowler. “We produce the physical card, activate it and provide fulfillment,” he says.
Card personalization has been available five years for open-loop prepaid cards and for one to two years for closed-loop cards. But the market for the products just now is beginning to take off, says Tim Sloane, vice president client services and director prepaid advisory services, Mercator Advisory Group in Maynard, Mass.
“It’s been a slow pickup, but it is becoming a phenomenal business now,” says Sloane without providing sales figures.  
The Moneris/DimpleDough partnership has the potential to appeal to a large audience because many consumers purchase prepaid cards from retailers’ Web sites, Sloane says. Mercator surveyed online 1,012 consumers, and 14% of respondents purchased prepaid cards through retailers’ Web sites. Mercator concluded its survey June 4, 2009, for the period covering the previous year, beginning May 28, 2008. Mercator released survey results in July 2009.  
“There is a good opportunity there to sell personalized gift cards through retailers’ Web sites,” Sloane says.
Personalization overcomes challenges faced by consumers uncomfortable giving typical gift cards as presents because they are impersonal, observers say. Indeed, card personalization works for the gift giver, says Sloane, noting it is too early to say whether receivers appreciate personalized cards any more than other types of cards.
Sloane says he gave his wife a personalized American Express gift card with a photograph of their new dog. “She still has the card, although no money is left on the card,” he says. New York-based American Express Co. also licenses DimpleDough’s card-personalization platform.
 “We love to hear stories like that,” Shawn Barrieau, CEO of Independence, Ohio-based DimpleDough, says of Sloane’s experience. “Personalized cards provide one-to-one communication, transcending the card’s value.”
 Personalized gift cards are inexpensive. “They cost less than a greeting card,” Fowler says.
Consumers also load more funds into personalized card accounts, he says. “The average load on a gift card is C$60 (US$58.19), but the average load on a personalized gift card is 25% higher,” Fowler adds.