It’s a scenario you’ve faced time and time again. You want to use your credit card points to purchase a flight, but you first need to convert the points to miles. Instead of that transaction being instantaneous, you receive a message the conversion will be processed in 72 hours.

But you need those miles now.

Enter qiibee—a blockchain-based loyalty platform and infrastructure provider—that aims to expedite this process and redefine the rewards point landscape by offering consumers access to over 3,000 loyalty brands like Apple, Adidas and Alaska Airlines. qiibee helps enterprises run their loyalty programs on-chain, bringing interoperability and new life to an industry where a high proportion of the $500 billion in loyalty points is left unspent in “stuck” accounts worldwide.

Co-founded in 2012 by Chief Executive Officer Gabriele Giancola and his brother Gianluca Giancola, qiibee was initially born out of the brothers’ love for gaming, and they’ve since spent over 10 years in the loyalty industry.

“There’s a lot of overlap with the mechanics you see in games—tiers, levels, perks and points,” Gabriele Giancola said to me in a recent interview. “On the other side, loyalty programs are built for you to use or buy more of a brand’s product. For games, they do the same thing—they just want you to play more games.”

Read more: A Sleepless Night and How Glow Labs’ Annie Reardon and Renee Russo Want to Reward Your Web3 Loyalty

With their gaming background, Giancola said he and his brother started helping brands bring more gamification to loyalty programs, and through that learned from a user perspective what makes loyalty programs exciting, what helps users become more engaged and what helps users derive more value from the programs.

“Billions of people use loyalty programs, but 0.001 percent know that loyalty programs—like airline miles programs—are the most valuable asset in the airline group,” Giancola said. “They make the most amount of cash selling miles, buying miles, earning miles with partners and spending miles with partners. They’re huge revenue and profit drivers for these airline groups.”

Giancola soon realized there was no infrastructure connecting the entire market together to make loyalty currencies interoperable. But while many loyalty programs generate massive amounts of capital, they are not tech companies—meaning the need for an interoperable market is less of a priority.

“They have a completely different focus, a completely different view,” Giancola said. “If it works, it works. They don’t really think about the background tech or efficiency gains. But we learned if we started to connect all of these loyalty programs and put all of these reward currencies on one decentralized infrastructure—where no one could tamper with the data—we could solve reconciliation costs, sentiment issues, and the points transfer delay for brands.”

Once he began to learn about blockchain in 2016 new avenues opened up, Giancola said, and “it became more and more clear what we needed to build.” He added, “Points and miles are an additional currency you have in your wallet, and the faster you can use them and the more places you can use it, the more it becomes liquid purchasing power.” 

qiibee launched a rewards marketplace in 2021 and last year unveiled a partnership with Miles & More—Europe’s largest frequent-flier program, in a step toward making rewards currencies more liquid. But not everyone—particularly consumers—know how to use their rewards points or have enough points to take home attractive redemption options from the pool of products or services available to them.

 “Maybe you have a lot of rewards points stuck across different accounts,” Giancola said. “When we say we make rewards more liquid, we’re actually using blockchain to make rewards interoperable with each other and helping reward currency issuers—such as frequent flier programs and hotels—onboard more partners faster and more efficiently.”

Reconciliation fix

On the qiibee marketplace, brands can put in a request to work with each other to avoid being paired with a competitor they may not want to help. According to Giancola, companies like American Express spend a few billion dollars per year for Delta Airlines miles.

“If you just have 0.1 percent of error, that’s a few million dollars,” Giancola said. “With blockchain, through one decentralized ledger—where all the data is in the same database and everyone has one source of truth—there are zero reconciliation issues anymore.”

And for the user, instead of waiting 72 hours for their points to convert, they’ll instead see an instant transaction.

The first step is replacing the infrastructure of loyalty programs and making it more efficient from a backend perspective, Giancola said

“When you create that efficiency and you can actually connect enough of these loyalty programs, that universal wallet with all of your statuses, exchange options and points is much easier to be created,” Giancola said. “But you first need the relationships with these loyalty programs and you need them integrated into one infrastructure.”

One infrastructure, powered by blockchain.

“If you create all of this on-chain liquidity, all of these points and miles become a huge payment currency,” Giancola said. “That’s what we see as the role of these rewards in the future—really being one additional payment option in your wallet and in your day-to-day portfolio of currencies.”

lead image: Gabriele Giancola