Member Spotlight — Giftbee: Unlocking the Value Trapped in Australia’s Gifting Economy
In fintech, we spend a lot of time talking about how to move money faster, more securely and with less friction. Much less attention is paid to value that never moves at all. Yet in Australia, a major inefficiency is hiding in plain sight: last Christmas alone, an estimated $1 billion in gifts went to waste, while a further $1.4 billion sat unused on gift cards. That is not just a retail inefficiency. It represents trapped value, poor customer experiences and unnecessary waste. At Giftbee, we saw an opportunity to approach the gifting category through a value lens: to make gifting more flexible, more usable and more likely to reach its intended purpose.
Giftbee was founded in Melbourne in 2024 by entrepreneur Mark Singer, with a simple belief that gifting should work better for everyone involved. Too often, gifts miss the mark - not because the intent is wrong, but because the experience is too rigid. A recipient may receive something they do not want, cannot use easily, or forget before it expires. Businesses, meanwhile, often have little visibility into whether their gifting, rewards or incentive programs are actually creating impact. We believe there is a better way: one that treats gifting not as a one-way transaction, but as flexible digital value that can adapt to the recipient while still delivering measurable outcomes for the sender.
That idea sits at the heart of the Giftbee platform today. We are reshaping the way businesses, brands and consumers give and receive gifts by making the experience simpler, more flexible and more meaningful. Recipients can accept a gift, swap it or pay it forward. They can also combine or split value, save and build their balance, and manage everything in one place. For businesses, Giftbee offers easy-to-use tools to send and track gifts, manage programs at scale, and measure success through reporting and analytics. The platform supports a wide range of use cases, including employee rewards and recognition, customer loyalty and retention, sales and channel incentives, and market research and consumer engagement. With a growing catalogue of Gift Cards and Merchandise in Australia, and access to over 6,000 brands across 100 global markets, our goal is to ensure that every dollar spent on gifting has a better chance of being used, appreciated and remembered.
One of the biggest challenges in building Giftbee has been reframing how organisations think about gifting in the first place. Traditional gifting models often appear simple on the surface, but they create friction underneath. Programs can be hard to administer, impact is difficult to measure, and value is frequently lost when gifts go unused or funds expire before they benefit the recipient. In a market where customers and employees increasingly expect personalisation, immediacy and choice, those shortcomings matter. Solving that problem requires more than digitising a gift card. It means building an experience around flexibility, transparency and usability, while also giving businesses the operational control, scalability and reporting they need.
That shift in expectations has also been one of our biggest growth drivers. Organisations are looking for smarter ways to engage employees, reward customers and incentivise behaviours. They do not just want to distribute value; they want that value to feel relevant, frictionless and aligned with their brand. They also want solutions that support broader ESG objectives by reducing waste and improving outcomes. Giftbee was built for exactly that environment. By combining recipient choice with better business tools, we are helping turn gifting from an administrative task into a strategic lever for engagement, loyalty and retention. In other words, we are not just helping businesses send gifts. We are helping them deliver better experiences and stronger ROI from their programs.
Looking ahead, our ambition is to build more than a better gifting platform. We see a larger fintech opportunity in unlocking value that is too often left static, fragmented or forgotten. The future of gifting should be flexible, trackable and user-led. It should allow businesses to distribute value with confidence and allow recipients to use that value in ways that genuinely suit them. That is the direction Giftbee is building toward: a world where every gift works harder, every reward feels more relevant and less value goes to waste. In a sector defined by removing friction from financial experiences, gifting may not be the most obvious place to start. But for us, that is exactly why it matters.
Learn more about Giftbee here: https://www.giftbee.com/
