Four McMaster students are helping a local gift-card cash-exchange company grow unexpectedly quickly in a relatively untapped Canadian market.
GiftCash is an online service startup based in Dundas that buys unredeemed or partially redeemed gift cards from customers in exchange for a percentage of the remaining value.
The company was co-founded in 2017 by Colin Moffat, a McMaster actuarial mathematics graduate, and his partner Kaya Harrod.
““Everybody buys gift cards and everybody receives them as gifts, and, a lot of time, people don't really want them,” Harrod said.
GiftCash runs a relatively simple but effective service. Prospective clients can go onto the site and check their gift card balance before submitting it. From there, the company offers a percentage of the card’s value. If the customer accepts, they receive an e-transfer payout within five business days.
Harrod and Moffat, are both from Ontario. Before starting the business, Moffat was playing professional poker in Las Vegas while completing his undergrad.
Inspired by a friend, Harrod and Moffat started the company as Moffat finished his degree. They officially incorporated GiftCash in August 2017, and hired their first employee in November.
Since 2017, GiftCash has grown quickly. Currently, more than 10,000 ‘orders’ of gift cards have been submitted to GiftCash, amounting to more than 40,000 cards redeemed by clients in total.
According to MarketWatch, Americans spent $130 billion on gift cards in 2017, but $1 billion were unspent.
One estimate in 2011 found that Canadians spent $6 billion a year on gift cards.
Because the Canadian gift card exchange industry is not as well-developed as the American market, Harrod and Moffat targeted Canadian clients at first.
“Raise and and CardPool kind of monopolized everything in the US, and they bring in millions of revenue themselves. There's nothing really like that in Canada,” Harrod said.
GiftCash’s biggest gift-card exchange competitor in Canada is CardSwap, which was founded in 2009.
However, encouraged by their early success, GiftCash expanded to the U.S. last year.
The company now already receives more orders per month from the U.S. than Canada.
GiftCash has fostered a close connection with McMaster as it has grown.
Including Moffat, eight GiftCash employees out of a total of fourteen in Canada are McMaster graduates or co-op students.
The company hired its first McMaster co-op student in 2018.
Currently, there are four co-op students working as data analysts, and Harrod and Moffat are looking to add to their team.
Harrod admits that she and Moffat did not expect the business to take off as fast as it did.
“Honestly, we didn't realize how big of a market this was until we kind of started. We kind of just jumped in headfirst and decided to do everything that we could,” Harrod said.
Harrod hopes GiftCash will be able to take the next step and become a major player in the Canadian and American market.
“Hopefully, by the end of this year, we'll have better infrastructure on the web site side, and we'll have a larger workforce,” Harrod said. “We'll be maybe not totally up there. I think that's a little bit of a high achievement. But at least we’ll be making a peg in the wall as we climb up to the top with our competitors.”
Students can find out more information about the startup at https://giftcash.ca/.
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On Aug. 30, 2015, Kanye West received an MTV Video Music Award and added a surprise announcement to his acceptance speech. In 2020, he will be running for president of the United States. It may sound absurd for a man with no political background, a track record of publicity gaffs, and a history as a meme to be considering the role of president, but if Donald Trump can do it, why not Yeezy?
Trump, a billionaire real estate mogul and television host, has been the popular front-runner for the Republican Party’s nomination. His popularity stems from his lack of previous involvement in politics, his forthrightness, and his business success—attributes which can also be attributed to West. He has no political experience to date, and his public candid outbursts are passionate and frank. As for business, if the accumulation of wealth makes for effective leadership—as Trump would have us believe—West has the same advantage.
At the age of 38, Kanye is worth an estimated 130 million, and his wife, Kim Kardashian, an additional 85. At the age of 44, Trump’s ex-wife claimed that he was worth a paltry 400 million, a far cry from the billions he supposedly owned at the time. Additionally, he inherited a portion of it, giving him a sizeable head start. Trump’s inheritance also included all of the benefits of being born to a millionaire, with financial direction from his father and a private school education. Even with these advantages, Trump’s financial history is not spotless: his company required a bailout in 1990, only 10 years after he took charge. West, on the other hand, came from a middle-class family, building his wealth from scratch. His effective personal branding and acclaimed musical career have rapidly developed his personal wealth. Trump is not the only aspiring president in possession of a fortune; however, the difference between the two is that West has actual experience amassing one.
An argument against West might be that he is not formal, refined or “presidential” enough, but let us take a moment to consider what that objection might actually mean. Let’s pretend for a second that expectations of presidential decorum are not inherently tied to white privilege. What exactly about Trump carries more of the essence of the “presidential” than Kanye West? Trump’s hairstyle has been a longstanding joke and his sexism and racism are rampant and ubiquitous. Trump’s behaviour is far from decorous, and leagues from what I would desire in a political leader. Let us instead agree that the quality that defines someone as presidential is the process of being elected in a presidential race.
Another advantage that West has over Trump is that he understands systemic racism. West has made multiple public comments about issues regarding race in America, whether it be about the alarmingly underwhelming government aid for Hurricane Katrina’s largely Black victims, or his comments on the persistence of racism despite some steps forward for people of colour. In the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement, with police brutality against Black Americans and people of colour being rife, I care more about a leader’s desire to fight racism than fulfilling Trump’s crackpot plan to build a wall along the Mexican border. Instead of recognizing racism to be a large scale, systematic and nuanced challenge for the next president, Trump has been known to blame immigrants and people of colour for crime rates and sexual assault statistics. Trump announced his candidacy alongside a comment that Mexican immigrants are largely drug dealers, rapists and criminals. This shows a complete lack of comprehension about the state of contemporary America. West understands that racism bars young Black men from positions of leadership or power in America, and we can be certain that as president he would want to change that. Trump may not care about Black people, but West sure does.
So, yes, if I could vote in the 2020 presidential elections, I would choose Kanye West over Donald Trump.
Photo Credit: Michael Tran
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By Abdullahi Sheikh
With the United States’ election day come and gone, it’s no small wonder that we pay so much attention to their politics.
We may have players as interesting as Justin Trudeau and as vile as Stephen Harper, but we’re almost a high school play compared to the Broadway musical that is American politics.
Regardless of how you feel about the candidates, you’ve probably got your own opinion on who should win and why and I’d bet your neighbour’s got one too.
Now, I’m not trying to say that we should focus solely on our own politics and ignore the rest of the world (probably exactly the opposite of what any newspaper should be advocating) but instead we should take a minute to assess why we are so fond of turning on the television to watch what new debacle whichever presidential candidate has caused.
I think that, ultimately, we’re just more interested by what’s happening just past the border, and it’s not just because they’ve got an African-American president, Silicon Valley and an IHop in every city (although that last one certainly helps.)
It really is more than that. Our infatuation with our Southern cousins must have some basis in reality, right?
There’s got to be a reason that American politics gets our hearts racing while Canadian politics make us check for a pulse.
Well, as someone whose been on both sides of the fence, I think it really just arises from a discontent we, the Canadian people, have regarding our own government and its inner workings.
Whether it’s our style of government (first-past-the-post tends to leave us annoyed the most) or the actions of our officials, we’ve become a bit bored with our government as a whole.
American politics serve as an interesting diversion from the regular tedium of Canadian politics. In a way, Canadian politics can be seen as a Big Top while American Politics represent Cirque du Soliel.
Although going to a circus can be fun, can it really compare to seeing horses trot to the musical styling’s of Michael Jackson?
Now, you don’t have to agree with me on this one, but next time you turn on the television, I want you to see which news channel you’d rather watch when they start to talk shop about politic
And, more importantly, I want you to think about why.
As for Michael Jackson, no, obviously not. Now if only we could get Romney’s horse in Cavalia.
