Swych, a digital gifting platform that currently processes more than a million gifting transactions a year for both consumers and businesses, today announced its advancement to a blockchain-based platform that it believes will significantly reduce the fees and other friction points associated with cross-border gifting.
The Swych gifting network enables frictionless cross-border person-to-person or business-to-consumer gifting and empowers instant digital gifting transactions with zero fees, agnostic of underlying fiat currency or geography. Any gift sent through the Swych platform can be “swyched,” redeemed, and spent at any retailer on the Swych network, ensuring satisfaction of both the sender and the recipient, eliminating the guesswork out of gifting, and erasing the challenge of geographical borders between customers.
“While the world has become increasingly interconnected since the arrival of the internet, the process of sending a gift — and in particular across countries — has remained stagnant with few and unimaginative choices, shipping hurdles and overall customer dissatisfaction. Our blockchain-powered platform will bring long overdue innovation to the $400B gifting market, now expected to grow to $700B by 2024, by making each gift a perfect one for recipients while eliminating loss of value through any fees or foreign exchange conversions.”
With a network of over 600+ partner brands worldwide, representing billions of products, this transition marks a significant advancement toward Swych’s mission of creating the global standard for digital gifting.
There has been an estimated $149 million in gift card sales in 2017 – an increase of 54% from 2007. Plastic gift cards have become synonymous with inflexibility, fraud, and obsolete technology. Additionally, traditional gift card networks and distribution schemes are difficult to scale across borders, and plastic gift cards are often forgotten in drawers. Building on its proven success with digital distribution, fraud management and strong data insights in consumers’ gifting behaviors, Swych’s blockchain integration enables new horizons for cross-border gifting, as well as several exciting new use cases such as loyalty redemption, employee incentives, frictionless travel shopping, and easy access to merchant offers.
Building on the Stellar Network, the platform’s blockchain elements operate seamlessly in the background. Swych users can easily send, redeem, and swych digital gift cards without any prior knowledge of blockchain technology, and without compromising on transaction speeds, security, and flexibility of the popular Swych gifting service.
“By using the Stellar Network, Swych enables instant and secure purchases redeemable with any of their retail partners across the globe. Swych is leading the way forward in the gifting industry by integrating blockchain technology and we’re excited to see how the industry will continue to evolve.”
Jain further added, “Working with Stellar and bringing the inherent advantages of the distributed ledger technology to the forefront, we intend to provide an example to the entire community of how blockchain can be used to solve a real-world problem that pretty much any consumer can identify with. Sending a digital gift to another consumer that can be instantly redeemed and spent for merchandise, travel, dining, entertainment or other popular categories without jumping through the hassles of bank accounts, plastic cards, cash withdrawals or foreign exchange fees is the perfect example of how to use technology to simplify consumers’ lives.”
This news comes on the heels of Swych’s recent partnership with WeChat, Travelex, and Finablr, and acquisition of GiftCardsIndia, which allows Swych users in the U.S. to send personalized digital gift cards to loved ones in India.