Philip Morris was looking for a solution that would help them save costs while adding more controls for the small payouts process. Over 50% of all product is distributed through small retailers, and it is typical in the FMCG sector to use small and sometimes infrequent merchandising incentives to retail store owners and independent distributors to keep the product on the shelf at the right price and inventory levels, and to educate them on new products.

The internal effort to make such payments is high, as various spreadsheets and tracking tools sit in different departments, and as well, such payments were made using pre-paid cards - which are often lost and must be replaced, or worse, result in unspend awards which cannot be reclaimed.

Worse, any unspent funds on a pre-paid card will remain with the pre-paid card company, resulting in an inability to be certain that incentives are fully appreciated and used by the beneficiaries.