This festive season, corporate gifting for employees goes digital

Every Diwali, your company gives you a box full of dry fruits and two glass bowls. Chances are you either give them away to someone else or don’t even bother taking them home. It lies there for a few months post which probably they get spoilt and you are required to dispose them. Not anymore. There are high chances that your firm may give you a gift card to buy stuff that you really need.

Moving away from cash incentives and physical gifts, more number of companies are now turning to digital gifting options including online coupons and gift cards. Not only is this effective from a roll-out perspective, it also gives a choice to employees to use it to purchase goods that they require.

Bhavik Vasa, Chief Growth Officer, ItzCash said that what started off from paper-based gift vouchers has now moved to open-loop gift cards. “For instance, we have the RuPay open loop gift cards that will help employees to buy products from a range of stores. What we are seeing is that while we offer branded gift card of single brands, there is a far quicker adoption of open-loop gift cards,” he added.

In terms of the companies, Vasa said that while several large corporates have already embraced this transition, there is also a rise in demand from the MSME sector. “The idea is to give a gift that is gratifying. Corporates have realised that this is a better way of disbursement and employees have also started accepting it,” said Vasa.

Another large player in the employee benefits space, Zeta is also seeing a rise in demand for digital gifting solutions. They have a digitised gifting suite, Zeta Spotlight.  This suite is a one-stop digital solution for employee gifting and incentive programme to offer corporates more customisable solutions for their employees.

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M Saraswathy

Special Correspondent|Moneycontrol

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Zeta Co-Founder and CTO Ramki Gaddipati said that cash bonuses are slowly disappearing and are only restricted to a certain segment of the worker class.

“A majority of people want to celebrate by personalised gifts. We recognise that and have been offering a range of products. Further, it also helps save tax for employees since for gifts up to Rs 5000, there is no income tax payable. Also, a corporate can gift a gift up to Rs 50,000 without attracting GST,” said Gaddipati.

Zeta’s Digi Gift offers digital gift vouchers via cloud technology and is received by employees on their Zeta accounts. Corporates can instantly disburse these vouchers digitally across locations.