Marks & Spencer Implements Gift Cards with Postilion
Postilion, a leading provider of software solutions for self-service banking and payments and a division of S1 Corporation (NASDAQ: SONE), today announced that Marks & Spencer has completed the implementation of a gift card program based on Postilion solutions.
The Postilion Card Issuer solution enables retailers to manage the entire life cycle of their gift cards, including traditional paper vouchers, gift card certificates, and electronic vouchers. This comprehensive solution controls the issuing, authorization, and account management for individual gift cards and batches of gift cards that can be offered as corporate incentives. Cards can be identified either by a magnetic stripe or a barcode and value is only loaded at the time of purchase. For multi-national retailers, such as Marks & Spencer, Postilion also provides the ability to issue and manage gift cards in multiple currencies, with the currency type loaded at the Point-of-Sale.
Following a successful pilot in the company’s Irish stores, the Marks & Spencer gift card program was launched in all UK stores in November 2007. “For the past five years, we have used the Postilion Retail solution to process card payments from our in-store Points-of-Sale tills, so we were confident that Postilion could handle the gift card program,” commented Darrell Stein, M&S Director of IT and logistics.
“Gift cards are proving increasingly popular with consumers in the UK, and the project with Marks & Spencer serves to highlight this,” said Grant Wyatt, General Manager, Postilion Europe. “We see a growing awareness in the retail community of the benefits of running a gift card program in-house. Not only does this provide the retailer with greater control and flexibility, but as volumes of gift card sales increase, the cost advantage of running these programs in-house becomes obvious. Managing gift cards internally with the Postilion Card Issuer solution makes sense from both an economic and a business perspective for organizations where gift cards make up a strategic part of their customer offering.”
