Due to the Covid crisis and the resulting increase of working from home (which will likely persist long after the crisis), the precious tradition (wide-spread in many companies) of collecting money for a gift for a colleague (typically for a wedding, child or pension) via a circulating envelope is now disappearing.

In our modern digital age, this tradition seems a bit archaic, but it definitely helps to enforce the bond between colleagues. With colleagues being one of the most important factors of employee happiness, this bonding is extremely important for employee motivation and as such for employee productivity and retention.

Some teams have switched to alternatives like someone collecting the money on his personal bank account and taking care of the gift, but this is very time-consuming (e.g. correctly identifying all transactions on his account, especially if the collector is organizing multiple gifts in parallel) and impersonal (i.e. not possible to leave a personal message or sign a card) and requires a big faith in the collector, who is the only one knowing the collected amount and knows what everyone has paid. Clearly a more advanced solution is required.

There are definitely many tools in the market to support this kind of process, such as:

• Kadonation

• TenGift App

• Grouptogether

• Cheddar Up

• eGifter

• Woohoo

• YouGotaGift

• Leetchi

• Gift2gether

• …​

Most of those solutions have however the issue that everyone needs to use the same app (which is not easy to convince a whole team of colleagues) or that the resulting collected amount needs to be spent on a gift (or gift voucher) on the platform, which is also not always desired.

As such integration this feature in your banking app, which can also be accessed by non-customers of the bank would be a far better solution, as:

• The banking app of a tier-1 bank might be installed already by many people

• People not having the app will not be very reluctant to install, due to the credibility of a large financial institution

• A bank does not need to make a direct profit on the service but can leverage the service to attract prospects to its platform and to propose other products and services. As such they don’t need to enforce spending the collected amount on the platform.

Obviously organizing such a group gift requires a whole orchestration of different steps. Below I try to give an overview of every step and the features such a tool can/should provide. The most important characteristic however of such a platform is that it remains easy, personal and fun.

Step 1: Create an event

The first step consists of creating the event (and its associated group). While above we focused on a professional context, this of course should not be so restrictive. A group gift can have many different occasions, e.g.

• In a professional context, this will typically be a retirement, departure, wedding, birth of a child or grandchild or anniversary

• In a private context, this will typically be for a baby shower, a marriage, a birthday gift, a graduation, a new home (housewarming party)…​

• Other contexts might be like a Teacher or Coach gift

In this first step, it should be possible to setup the event. This requires the input of a number of main characteristics, like

• Inputting the celebrator (i.e. input of the name and potentially a picture or select from a list of contacts or select from social media)

• Type of event, i.e. select from a pre-defined list of event types

• Description of the event

• Date of the event

• Visibility of the event (Public, Anyone with a link or Private)

But it should also be possible to define some more advanced settings (which are defaulted if not set):

• Add a picture of the event (optional)

• Date before which contributions should be done (by default set 5 days before the event date)

• Description of the gift which is intended to be bought (optional)

• Target amount for the specific gift (optional)

• Define specific fixed contribution amount (optional)

• Define minimum/maximum contribution amount (optional)

• Configure which type of wishes can be added, i.e. message (on a card or not), picture and/or video (by default all types of messages are possible)

• Allow people to add wishes without contributing (disabled by default)

• Enable or not that contributors can give suggestions for a gift (disabled by default)

• Enable or not that contributors can send the event to other people for contribution (enabled by default)

• Configure the transparency setup, i.e.

  • Does the recipient of the group gift see the contributed amount of each contributor (by default disabled)

  • Do the contributors to the group gift see the contributed amount of each contributor (by default disabled)

  • Can contributors see each other’s messages (by default enabled)

• Configure if the gift administrator needs to be notified when a contribution is done (disabled by default)

• Configure if (and when) automatic reminders should be sent out (enabled by default)

Step 2: Invite people to contribute

Once the event has been setup, it is time to invite people to contribute.
The tool should support this step via different ways of selecting and inviting contributors.

• Selecting

  • Manual input of contributors

  • Selecting from a list of contact persons in the (banking) app. A link with your "Payment Contact Management" module could be interesting here. Cfr. my blog "Payment contact management - Room for innovation - https://bankloch.blogspot.com/2020/09/payment-contact-management-room-for.html"

  • Selection of contacts via social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn…​)

  • Upload contributors from a file

  • The tool should ensure that the "gift recipient" is automatically filtered out. If the system detects there is a potential match between a created contributor and the "gift recipient", a warning pop-up should be showed.

• Inviting

  • Invite the contributors via email, SMS, WhatsApp, Social Media, internal messaging tool of the app…​

  • Ability to share a link on social media

  • The tool should obviously customize the invitation message automatically based on the settings of the event, but it should also be possible to adapt the pre-defined message.

• If address info (e.g. telephone number, email address, Facebook ID…​) of a contributor is missing, the tool should inform the administrator and ask to complete the missing information or to switch to another delivery option for this contributor.

• It should also be possible to make another person also administrator. This means this person can also manage the event settings, do closer follow-up of the event and withdraw money from the money pot.

Step 3: Contribute to a group gift

When a contributor clicks on an invitation or on a shared link, he will arrive on the contribution screen. Depending on the settings of the event, this screen will be customized.

Typical features of this step will be:

• Visualization of all details of the event (recipient name, description, picture…​)

• A contribute button, allowing to pay with different payment methods, like credit transfer (e.g. automatically if user is a customer of the bank, via QR code or via PSD2), debit card, credit card, PayPal…​ This includes obviously also the input of the amount, unless of course a fixed amount was set by the event administrator.

• Get contribution info, which allows to retrieve details like:

  • Overview of your past contributions to people present in the contribution group (with info like date, event type and event gift recipient) to help determine amount of the contribution

  • Overview of all contributions thus far, if the event administrator has enabled this transparency setting

  • The average contribution amount till now

  • The total contribution amount and number of contributors till now

• Leave your personal details, if not already known by the system, like name, email, phone, a potential picture…​

• Leave a personal message:

  • See the messages already left by other people (if transparency setting is enabled)

  • Allow to input or upload a personal message, i.e. text, picture and/or (wish-)video

• When the event administrator has enabled the setting for suggestions for a gift, there will also be the option to add suggestions.

• When the event administrator has enabled the setting for sharing the event with other people, there will also be the option to invite other people or share the link via social media.

• For gifts in a professional context, an interesting feature is also the existence of a "Company Wallet", which can be accessed by specific employees (e.g. the CHRO) to contribute to colleague gifts. This company wallet could be filled by the employer by crediting an amount, but also in other ways, like automatic upward rounding of all employee expenses reimbursement and putting the difference on the Company Wallet (as a thank you to employees for advancing the expense), automatic filling when certain team/company objectives are met, automatic filling by challenges (e.g. for every kilometer commuted by bike employer does a contribution in the Company Wallet)

Step 4: Follow-up of contributions

Obviously the event administrator(s) should be able to easily follow-up the received contributions, i.e.

• Get notified (when setting is activated) each time someone contributes

• Have a clear view of who has contributed and see how the total amount grows.

• Have a view on all received messages for the "celebrator"

• Automatic or manual generation of reminders to invited persons, who didn’t contribute yet

• Possibility to export the personal messages and/or contributions

Step 5: Consume/spend the collected money

Once contributions have been collected (or at least a big part), the event administrator can use the collected money to buy something.
This process should also be supported by the tool, with features like:

• Get a view on the recipient’s interests, hobbies and consumption patterns (when recipient has given consent to share this info). This can be collected via a questionnaire but can also be retrieved from the financial transaction history of the recipient.

• Automatically convert a small part of the contributions to a physical card, which can automatically be printed, with a chosen design (e.g. adapted to the event type or with a company logo) and can automatically include messages and/or pictures added by contributors. Obviously the delivery details for this card can also be chosen.

• Consume (a part of) the money pot, by

  • Converting it to a gift card (with specific acceptance network)

  • Donating to a charity

  • Withdrawing money to account of administrator

  • Automatically creating a virtual pre-paid credit card, which contains the money pot amount and can then be used to buy items

  • Buy specific products or store-specific gift vouchers directly on the gift tool

• The tool can furthermore offer nice deals on vouchers or products and can provide some kind of loyalty point system.

• In case of charity donation, it can be interesting to automatically generate fiscal attestation for all contributors contributing more than the minimum for fiscal deductibility (40 EUR in Belgium) and a fiscal attestation for the recipient for the remainder amount (if larger than 40 EUR).

Step 6: Hand-over to the recipient

Finally there is the hand-over to the recipient, which typically happens on the event date.

At that moment, it should be possible to:

• Push all personal messages to the gift recipient

• Send the acquired gift card(s) or vouchers to the recipient

• Transfer any remaining money in the money pot to the recipient via a wire transfer

• Close the group gift event

Those actions can be triggered manually by the event administrator or automatically on the event date/time.

Conclusion

This blog describes a simple, but very common use case, which is ideal for banks to offer as a value-added service to its retail and corporate customers.
It is a nice example of a service on top of a standard payment flow, just like:

• Peer-to-peer payments, cfr. my blog "Peer-to-peer payments - A crucial component towards a cashless society - https://bankloch.blogspot.com/2020/12/peer-to-peer-payments-crucial-component.html"

• PFM and BFM modules, cfr. my blog "PFM, BFM, Financial Butler, Financial Cockpit, Account Aggregator…​ - Will the cumbersome administrative tasks on your financials finally be taken over by your financial institution?(https://bankloch.blogspot.com/2020/02/pfm-bfm-financial-butler-financial.html)"

• Subscription management, cfr. my blog "Manage the new jungle of your subscriptions - Banks and Fintechs should step up to the challenge(https://bankloch.blogspot.com/2020/08/manage-new-jungle-of-your-subscriptions.html)"

• Payment contact management, cfr. my blog "Payment contact management - Room for innovation(https://bankloch.blogspot.com/2020/09/payment-contact-management-room-for.html)"

Check out all my blogs on https://bankloch.blogspot.com/