Gift Cards: A Booming Niche in the Marketplace

Hardy reports that digital presses are producing a growing volume of highly personalized gift cards — but metallic inks won’t work with digital presses because of the potential for the powdered metal they contain to cause electrical problems in the press.

The printed gift cards are then laminated and die cut. All of these processes must result in a card whose dimensions comply with ISO standards, so that they will work reliably in any ATM or point-of-sale device. “The hardest part has to do with encoding the cards,” Hardy says. The card producer must work closely with the ultimate customer’s POS system provider and its MIS department to be sure each card is encoded so that it will be readable by the customer’s cash registers. Every card must work, every time, and no two cards can be duplicates. “There’s zero tolerance for mistakes,” says Jacobs.