In a written interview with Korea IT Times, Gabriele Giancola, CEO and Co-Founder of qiibee, boldly outlines the company's groundbreaking approach to transforming the global rewards economy. In 2017, qiibee set out to unlock the value of over $500 billion in unspent loyalty points using blockchain technology to enhance their liquidity. The qiibee platform makes it simple for loyalty programs to integrate using APIs and white-label solutions, allowing them to exchange rewards, including NFTs. A notable partnership with Lufthansa's Miles & More proves that qiibee can improve rewards liquidity and integration via blockchain. Giancola confidently highlights the advantages of blockchain, including its ability to ensure secure, tamper-proof storage and facilitate the interoperability of loyalty points. The qiibee Foundation, based in Switzerland, is advancing blockchain technology to create a robust loyalty ecosystem. Giancola envisions the future of loyalty programs integrated with blockchain, streamlining operations and bolstering security and trust. He also sees potential in integrating NFTs within loyalty programs, offering unique, tradable digital assets that provide real utility to consumers. The following is a Q&A with Gabriele Giancola.
Could you provide an overview of qiibee with its core focus areas? What is qiibee’s vision and mission?
Did you know that globally, consumers have accumulated approximately $500 billion worth of unspent loyalty points, a massive reservoir of value that remains largely untouched due to restrictions on earning, spending, and converting these rewards across different platforms. This challenge is where the qiibee foundation comes into play.
Together with my brother, Gianluca, we founded the qiibee foundation in 2017 to revolutionise the rewards economy. Our vision is to position rewards as one of the top three payment methods in the world. To achieve this, we focus on unlocking the purchasing power and maximising the liquidity of the global rewards economy, thereby enhancing economic freedom for consumers and businesses alike.
The global rewards economy is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 26%, expanding to $599 billion by 2025. Despite the vast potential, many loyalty programs fail to leverage their most valuable asset—the rewards themselves—leading to consumer disengagement and a significant amount of unutilised rewards. By enabling loyalty programs to improve the liquidity of their rewards, the qiibee foundation is dedicated to transforming these illiquid rewards into a more fluid and exchangeable form. This transformation aims to empower billions of consumers to freely exchange rewards, bringing this purchasing power back into the wallets of consumers and companies.
What have been some successful partnerships of qiibee foundation and what are the benefits?
Since the start of the qiibee foundation, several successful partnerships have highlighted the company’s role as the leading blockchain-based B2B marketplace for customer loyalty. One of these partnerships is with Miles & More, the loyalty program of the Lufthansa Group, allowing small and medium-sized enterprises to seamlessly join the Miles & More ecosystem, expanding the network of partners and simplifying the process for members to earn and redeem miles. This partnership exemplifies the qiibee foundation's expertise in enabling smooth integration and improving rewards liquidity through blockchain technology.
Our platform offers easy integration via API or white-label solutions, enabling the tokenisation and exchange of rewards like points, miles, and NFTs. It also supports creating NFTs without coding, providing unique digital assets for SMEs. The platform's analytics dashboard helps track rewards and reduce management costs. Governed by a consortium blockchain, the qiibee foundation ensures transparency and efficiency, safeguarding rewards and simplifying the management of loyalty programs.
Why base a payment infrastructure for rewards economy on blockchain? What do you see as the main challenges and opportunities in blockchain?
Building a rewards economy on blockchain offers two significant advantages. Firstly, customers don't need to trust a singular entity with their rewards, as blockchain technology ensures the secure storage of all loyalty points. Blockchain guarantees that these points can't be manipulated, altered, or deleted.
Secondly, blockchain technology provides one unique foundation to make all loyalty points interoperable, simplifying the exchange of assets within the rewards economy. Integrating various centralized databases of different loyalty programs without the use of blockchain is challenging and doesn’t provide an efficient process to make these points interoperable. Using blockchain’s decentralized technology will reduce these issues by permitting the seamless and secure exchange of loyalty points between businesses.
What is the role of the qiibee foundation about qiibee?
The qiibee Foundation is a non-profit organization based in Zug, Switzerland with the purpose of promoting and developing the qiibee loyalty blockchain infrastructure and promoting and supporting applications developed for the qiibee ecosystem.
While qiibee provides the practical marketplace and tools for immediate business benefits, the qiibee foundation focuses on pioneering the underlying blockchain technology that drives these advancements, setting the standard for the future of loyalty and rewards programs globally.
Together, qiibee and the qiibee foundation work to ensure that the blockchain-based loyalty ecosystem is both technologically robust, providing instant access to world-renowned brands, a vast array of rewards, cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and millions of new members. The qiibee platform empowers loyalty programs to seamlessly integrate with the qiibee marketplace in just one click, eliminating reconciliation costs, enhancing security, and significantly boosting customer engagement and member acquisition.
How do you see the future of loyalty programs developing alongside blockchain?
It is clear that loyalty programs need to evolve with technology, and blockchain is a trending technology that continues to revolutionize how we view loyalty. There are loyalty programs that hold millions of users, using traditional technology that is cumbersome, slow and inaccessible. Shifting the activities associated with these loyalty programs to blockchain based solutions lessens the gap between the consumer and brand, and streamlines the reward reconciliation process. This can not only stifle a brand’s ability to deliver rewards to consumers, but also costs businesses money.
Blockchain will play a massive role in transforming the infrastructure upon which reward programs are built, easing the reconciliation process for rewards and reducing the costs associated with the implementation of these rewards. Blockchain can also enhance trust among customers by protecting against fraud and data corruption.
Can you share your thoughts on the integration of NFTs within loyalty programs?
There is potential for NFTs to be integrated into loyalty programs, as NFTs can be used to represent unique loyalty assets, like VIP lounge access or private dining experiences, that can be tokenized and traded outside of the loyalty program. Through this integration, eventually, NFTs will make the rewards associated with loyalty programs more transactional. By tokenizing unique loyalty assets and experiences, companies can provide real utility and value to customers through NFTs.
This could in turn re-focus the central purpose of NFTs, from a tokenization of digital art or collectibles to a real-world use case adopted by major companies across the globe.
