Giftly has selected Lithic to process its prepaid gifting cards, connecting a personalised gifting service to transaction controls that operate when recipients spend. Lithic announced the partnership on January 14, 2026, and identified Column as the issuer of Giftly Prepaid Gift cards. [S01]

Three businesses, three distinct roles

The arrangement separates the customer experience, processing infrastructure and card issuance. That distinction matters for buyers evaluating a gifting platform: a familiar front-end brand does not, by itself, explain who runs the payment programme behind it.

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Three businesses, three distinct roles

Participant

Role described in the announcement

Giftly

Gifting platform and customer experience

Lithic

Issuer processing and transaction controls

Column

Issuer of Giftly Prepaid Gift cards

Giftly combines monetary gifts with a personal message and a suggestion about how to use them. Its own description stresses recipient choice. A restaurant recommendation in that experience should therefore not be confused with a merchant-issued voucher restricted to that restaurant. [S01] [S02]

Control moves closer to the transaction

The announced setup supports virtual and physical prepaid cards, digital wallets, custom fraud logic through Authorization Stream Access, and authorization rules including velocity limits. Lithic describes these as capabilities supporting the programme; it provides no measured reduction in fraud or increase in payment approval rates. [S01]

For a programme operator, these tools address a practical tension. A gift should be easy for its legitimate recipient to use, while spending controls must still identify activity that falls outside the programme’s rules. The useful question is how a control behaves for real recipients, including when it declines a payment or produces a false alarm.

Separating the roles also makes procurement questions more precise. A buyer can ask the gifting platform about delivery and recipient support, the processor about authorization behaviour, and the issuer about the card programme. Those questions concern different parts of the same experience and should not be collapsed into a single promise of flexibility.

What the announcement establishes

The release confirms the participants and the intended processing features. It does not publish commercial terms, transaction volumes, a migration timetable or a dated completion milestone. [S01] The business significance is the choice of infrastructure: a gifting proposition built around recipient freedom also needs a way to manage the payments that make that freedom usable.

For employers and other business senders, evaluating that proposition means following the whole journey from the gift message to the final purchase. Delivery, card access, payment acceptance and support are separate points at which a seemingly simple gift can become complicated. The partnership describes the machinery behind that journey, while its operating results remain a separate question.