What happens to unused gift card balances?

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What breakage means in a rewards programme

Breakage refers to the portion of a gift card’s value that a recipient never spends. How that residual balance is treated depends entirely on the type of card issued through Xoxoday Plum, and understanding the distinction matters when designing incentive programmes at scale.

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Prepaid Visa and Mastercard gift cards

For open-loop prepaid cards — Visa and Mastercard gift cards issued via Xoxoday Plum — unused funds are non-recoverable. Once the card expires or the redemption window closes, the remaining balance cannot be refunded, transferred, or credited back to the programme budget. This is an industry-standard rule set by the card-issuing networks themselves, not a policy unique to Xoxoday Plum. If your organisation distributes year-end performance bonuses or milestone awards through prepaid Visa cards, communicating expiry dates clearly to recipients at the point of delivery significantly reduces unused balances. Xoxoday Plum surfaces card validity details within the recipient’s redemption experience to support this.

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Brand-specific gift cards

For closed-loop brand gift cards — such as those from Amazon, Starbucks, or Flipkart — breakage is governed by the issuing brand’s own terms and the country in which the card is redeemed. Xoxoday Plum sources and delivers these cards on behalf of the programme administrator but does not override or modify the brand’s policies around balance expiry, partial use, or dormancy. For example, a Starbucks gift card distributed through Xoxoday Plum to an employee in India is subject to Starbucks India’s gift card terms. A similar card sent to a recipient in the UAE follows Starbucks UAE’s terms. Validity periods, expiry rules, and partial-redemption conditions all vary by brand and geography.

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Planning for breakage in reward budgets

Finance and HR teams using Workday or SAP SuccessFactors to manage reward spend should factor potential breakage into programme planning, particularly when issuing open-loop prepaid cards in bulk. Xoxoday Plum provides programme administrators with redemption utilisation data so they can monitor how effectively distributed value is being spent and refine future distributions accordingly. Where flexibility exists, selecting brand gift cards with longer validity periods — or cards that carry no expiry — reduces the likelihood of breakage and improves the recipient experience across distributed or global teams.

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Reviewing card terms before issuing

Xoxoday Plum surfaces card validity and usage conditions in the product catalogue before an administrator confirms a reward order. Reviewing these details at the selection stage allows teams to match the right card type to their recipient base, geography, and redemption timeline — reducing breakage risk before it occurs.

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Learn more: Xoxoday Plum Help Centre — Gifting