Christmas rewards are changing at some of the UK’s smaller employers. Gloucester web host Fasthosts has swapped Amazon vouchers for the Gloucester Gift Card in its staff awards, and Sunderland’s Siblings Nurseries and Ilkley’s Ideal Extraction have made similar switches, as part of Miconex’s Choose local. Make the switch campaign. Each card can only be spent with businesses in the town it is named after.
Demand is there. In Miconex’s 2026 research, 88% of employees said they would like a gift card from their employer at Christmas, and 75 digital Town & City Gift Cards are now available through reward platforms such as Perkbox and Voucher Express. A gift card is money with the rules set before it is spent, deciding where it goes and how much there is.
That idea runs through much of the way the UK will pay this Christmas. From a gift card that only works in one town to a mobile wallet that draws on a debit card, and even a pay-by-phone deposit at an online casino capped by the network, more spending now comes with its limits fixed in advance.
Debit sits behind almost every tap
The wider payment data shows how much UK spending already runs on debit. UK Finance’s latest Payment Markets report found cards made up 64% of UK payments in 2025, with debit cards alone behind 26.6 billion transactions, more than half the total. Contactless reached 19.2 billion payments, 39% of the total, against 3% a decade earlier.
Mobile wallets are now mainstream, with 65% of adults registered in 2025, up from 57% a year before, and around nine in ten of them set a debit card as the default. Most taps of a phone at the till therefore spend money already sitting in a current account, which keeps Christmas spending tied to what is in the bank. It also gives shoppers a running record of every purchase on one statement, card by card.
Online casinos operating within the UK market run their cashiers on that debit-first footing, with debit cards and e-wallets the main ways to deposit. Pay by phone bill adds a ceiling of its own, with daily limits of between £30 and £240 depending on the network. Like a gift card, it caps the amount before any payment is made, which keeps each deposit small by design and spreads spending across the month.
One card for the counter, the website and the app
Retailers are building gift cards into every channel. Toolstation has launched an omnichannel gift card programme with Edenred Payment Solutions that works across its 590-plus UK branches, online and in its app, and it went from integration to in-store launch in eight weeks. The speed matters as much as the card, because a programme that takes a year to build misses the season it was meant for.
The result is a gift card that behaves like any other payment method, accepted wherever the customer chooses to shop. For a chain with trade and DIY customers, that removes the question of where a card can be used, which is the point at which many gift cards go unspent.
Bank transfers fill the gaps
Not every payment goes through a card. Faster Payments and other remote banking reached 6.2 billion transactions in 2025, making them the second most used method after debit cards, and 91% of adults now use at least one form of remote banking. Splitting a restaurant bill, paying a tradesperson or sending money to family at Christmas now rarely involves cash or a cheque.
What it means at the till
For retailers, the lesson of the season is to accept every route customers already use. That means taking local gift cards as well as their own, keeping wallets fast at the counter and making sure online checkouts offer the debit and bank options people default to. A missed payment method is a missed sale in the busiest weeks of the year.
Whether the money is on a Gloucester Gift Card, in a debit-backed phone wallet or behind a capped pay-by-phone deposit at an online casino, the pattern this Christmas is the same. People are spending money they already have, within limits they or their employer set, and the businesses that fit around those limits will be the ones that see the spend.
