The Next Opportunity in Prepaid

LTP: Can you provide us with a brief introduction to SmartGift, its technology and the core problem it solves?

Monika Kochhar: SmartGift innovates the multi-billion-dollar gifting economy. We basically have two options when buying for others. We can either buy a product or a gift card.

When we give a product, we have limited information about the recipient such as their size or color preference resulting in suboptimal gifts or returns. In 2014, Americans returned $284B worth of merchandise. About 20% of those returns, or roughly $60, happened during the holiday season. Best Buy estimated that returns cost it around $400M or about 10% of revenue that year.

Gift cards offer flexibility, but in a recent survey, 83% of people who identified themselves as gift card givers wished they had done a better job by giving something more personal.

Gifting needed a workflow that would eliminate these inefficiencies and transformed the consumer experience by making it thoughtful and engaging, yet flexible.

Watch the full interview here.