Can employees in New Zealand use the Australian SmartSpending™ site?

Many client organizations have their operations in both Australia and New Zealand. We sometimes get asked if employees in New Zealand can access and take advantage of the discount offers on the Australian SmartSpending™ platform. 

Reward Gateway runs the Australian and New Zealand platforms as two completely separate programs. 

For an employee in New Zealand to access the Australian platform, they would need to send a request to their company's HR department for a new and separate account to be set up on the Australian site.

Why are they run separately?

Combining the programs for different countries may sound like an easy thing to do, but there are two main reasons why this is not something that could work for SmartSpending™:

• The programs in different countries have different, country-specific retailers. To make sure that employees have the best experience, we want them to access the widest range of products possible that they will definitely be able to use in their home country. If we only offered retailers that operated across the two countries we would limit the selection greatly. These would be reduced further still if we had to ensure that the offer and the terms for offer redemption in each location were identical. For example, a store in one country may not accept gift cards that were not purchased locally even though the retailer operates in both locations.
• Each country's program operates with its own single currency with no conversion facility. To have multi-currency and conversion enabled would be incredibly complex to engineer and, given the reason above, would not provide users with access to additional retailers anyway.