A rewards catalogue sounds like a feature. It becomes a product. Most fintechs find this out the hard way.

Adding gift cards to a fintech product is one of the most common integration requests we see at Bamboo Card. It is also one of the most underestimated. Here is what tends to go wrong, and what the teams who get it right do differently.

The number of brands in a catalogue matters less than the right brands in the right markets. A catalogue with three thousand brands concentrated in North America and Western Europe is not a global catalogue. It is a regional catalogue with a large number next to it.

For a fintech operating across the Middle East, Southeast Asia, or Africa, the catalogue question is really a regional brand coverage question. Which brands do users in those markets actually want to spend on? Are the top telecoms, retail, and gaming brands represented with real stock and real uptime?

Vetting this before integration saves significant rework later.

Gift cards are priced in local currencies. Users hold balances in other currencies. The conversion between the two happens somewhere, and if the platform is not transparent about where, the margin is probably coming from the user experience.

Mid-market FX rates with no markup is the standard worth holding any rewards infrastructure provider to. Any deviation from that is a cost being absorbed by your programme budget, your users, or both.

The fintechs that get this right build FX clarity into their evaluation criteria before they sign a commercial agreement, not after they have launched and started seeing margin erosion.

SDK-based integrations introduce dependency on another company’s release cycle. When the SDK updates, your engineering team has to update too. When the SDK breaks, your rewards feature breaks.

A well-documented REST API with an OpenAPI specification is the more durable integration path. Your team builds once to a stable spec. The catalogue updates automatically. The infrastructure scales underneath without re-platforming.

The integration effort is front-loaded, but the ongoing maintenance burden is dramatically lower.

Rewards features touch users at moments of high expectation. A user who has just redeemed loyalty points and triggered a gift card delivery is not in a patient frame of mind if something goes wrong.

The support infrastructure behind a rewards integration matters as much as the technical integration itself. Who picks up when a delivery fails at 11pm on a Friday? What is the first response time SLA? Is there a dedicated solutions engineer who knows your integration?

These are questions worth asking before launch, not after the first incident.

A glossy product demo can show a seamless user experience without revealing anything about uptime, delivery speed, or what happens under load.

The infrastructure questions worth asking are: what is the uptime SLA and is it contractually guaranteed? What percentage of orders are delivered in under two seconds? What does the platform handle at peak volume, and how does that compare to your projected peak?

A 99.9% uptime SLA means about eight and a half hours of downtime per year. For a rewards feature in a high-frequency fintech product, that is not a small number.

The fintechs that get rewards right treat the infrastructure evaluation as seriously as they treat any other piece of production infrastructure. Because that is what it is.

They validate catalogue coverage in their actual markets before they integrate. They ask explicit questions about FX, uptime, and delivery SLAs. They choose API-first integrations over SDK dependencies. And they confirm the support model before launch.

The reward catalogue can be a meaningful differentiator for a fintech product. The infrastructure underneath determines whether it stays that way.