Breakage is the portion of prepaid or gift-card value that is never redeemed by the customer, including expired balances and small leftover amounts. Retailers track breakage closely because, depending on local regulation, unredeemed value can eventually be recognised as revenue or must be remitted to the authorities.

Stored value is money held on a card, account, or wallet that can be spent later without a linked bank account. Gift cards, prepaid cards, and transit passes are common examples. The balance decreases with each transaction and can often be reloaded, making stored value central to prepaid commerce.

Activation is the moment a gift or prepaid card becomes usable. At the point of sale or through an API call, the card's unique number is switched on and its starting balance is registered in the issuer's system. Until activation, the card holds no value and cannot be redeemed.

Omni-channel redemption

Omni-channel redemption lets a customer use one prepaid balance seamlessly across every sales channel — in a physical store, on a website, or inside a mobile app. The balance and transaction history stay synchronised in real time, so spending in one channel is instantly reflected everywhere else.

Float is the total outstanding prepaid balance a company holds on behalf of its customers before that value is redeemed. It represents both a liability and a source of working capital, so managing float responsibly is a core compliance and treasury concern for any large gift-card program.

Illustration of reports, analytics dashboards, prepaid cards and a magnifier representing Ogloba resources

Resources · Insights

Resource Center

Technical deep-dives, practical guides, proprietary data stories, and a plain-language glossary — everything you need to build and scale a gift & prepaid program.

Insights & guides

Hands-on knowledge from the teams running gift card and prepaid programs at enterprise scale.

Technical deep-dives

Architecture and engineering write-ups drawn from real deployments — rollout strategy, integration patterns, and the trade-offs our partners chose, each one documented with the data behind every call.

Inside a leading home-improvement group's omni-channel rollout
How a leading home-improvement group unified gift cards across thousands of stores and online without downtime.
Read more
POS architecture, end to end
A technical look at how Ogloba's browser-based POS activates and redeems value securely at any counter.
Read more

Guides

Step-by-step playbooks to get a program live fast. Practical guides covering scoping, launch, and scale across channels and markets — written by the teams who actually run the rollouts.

How digital gift-card forms work
A step-by-step guide to issuing, delivering, and activating a digital gift card from a single web form.
Read more
API integration in 3 days
The fast track to connecting your storefront to Ogloba's issuance and redemption APIs.
Read more

Proprietary data stories

What our anonymised, cross-market data actually shows. Patterns, anomalies, and benchmarks drawn from billions of transactions — the numbers that shape how every new program gets designed today.

The truth about unused balances
What our anonymised data reveals about breakage rates — and the levers that reduce them.
Read more
Adoption rates across channels
Where customers really activate and redeem, and what it means for your channel mix.
Read more

Glossary of prepaid terms

Plain-language definitions, written short enough to power voice answers and featured snippets.

A gift card is a prepaid payment product, physical or digital, loaded with a fixed or variable monetary value that the holder can redeem for goods or services at one or more participating retailers. Balances are tracked in real time, and modern cards work across in-store, online, and mobile channels.

Keep exploring

Blog

Stories from the gift card frontier

Industry trends, product updates, and customer stories from the brands shaping prepaid and loyalty.

Read the blog

Comparison Hub

Ogloba vs Givex, SVS & First Data

See how Ogloba stacks up against legacy gift card platforms on architecture, time-to-launch, and total cost.

See the comparison

Connect with us

Schedule a quick call to learn how Ogloba can turn your regional data into a powerful advantage.

Resource Center

Insights & guides

Technical deep-dives

Inside a leading home-improvement group's omni-channel rollout

POS architecture, end to end

Guides

How digital gift-card forms work

API integration in 3 days

Proprietary data stories

The truth about unused balances

Adoption rates across channels

Glossary of prepaid terms

Gift card

Breakage

Stored value

Activation

Omni-channel redemption

Float

Keep exploring

Stories from the gift card frontier

Ogloba vs Givex, SVS & First Data

Connect with us