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More than you want to know about gift cards

bam.kalzumeus.com · 2,391 words · saved by 1 readers

Gift cards are a loosely-regulated quasi-financial product and frequently misunderstood. Here's how they operate under the hood.

More than you want to know about gift cards Patrick McKenzie (patio11) • Dec 13th, 2021 There are few things comedians and personal finance writers agree on, but one comes up every holiday season: “Gift cards. For when you want to give someone money, except worse.” Like many topics in financial infrastructure, they’re a fascinating Gordian knot of user needs, business incentives, government regulation, and infrastructural weirdness. Let’s start unraveling it. How the payments industry thinks of gift cards The industry taxonomy for gift cards (and gift certificates, and pre-paid cards, and

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