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as he witnessed someone
pumping gas and trying to
get the pump to an even dol-
lar amount – even though the
individual was paying with a
credit card. Consumers, re-
gardless of age, still live in a
dual world of cash and card
based payments, so the idea
of changing the paradigm of
giving spare coins to charity
into giving card based pay-
ments was created.
“We’ve all had the op-
portunity to put money into
those little bins at the coun-
ter checkouts in the past, but
they tend to be disappearing
over time because of the in-
creased use of electronic pay-
ments,” said Beaton about
one of the new and signifi-
cant challenges facing chari-
ties today.
Beaton’s
solution
to
that challenge in creating
ChangeIt, a virtual change do-
nation program, seems to be
heavily verified by the statis-
tics. Simply put, a Polaris Stra-
tegic Insight Survey in 2013
found that about a quarter
of research respondents in-
dicated that they would give
more if there were more con-
venient ways to give.
“While a lot of charities
will support multiple forms
of payment, such as via credit
card, a lot of them are still in
the old age of cheques and
door-to-door solicitation. The
common thread is that charities are asking
their donors repeatedly to give instead of cre-
ating interesting ways to provide support on
a regular and recurring basis. Unfortunately
there has been limited innovation in the chari-
table giving space,” reflects Mike Kitchen, CEO
of ChangeIt in a recent interviewwith Business
Elite Canada. Beaton and the company’s board
of directors elected Kitchen onto the team as
CEO in January of this year, after spending 17
years in the payments business most recent-
ly as the Head of North American Payments
at BMO Financial Group, when he was ap-
proached by an investor to take a look at the
company.
Kitchen, as a senior leader running BMO’s
Credit Card business, had seen countless busi-
ness pitches trying to leverage payment cards,
including numerous Affinity Cards that had a
small amount of money going to the charity or
organization. While Affinity Cards are popular,
these programs lacked the ability to engage
the cardholder as the customer never knew
the impact they were making nor did they re-
ceive tax receipts for the program. For other
concepts, they often fell short on delivering
core value to the Bank or were simply too ex-
pensive to implement. Kitchen, upon his first
meeting with ChangeIt’s founder, knew that
this highly engaging customer model could
deliver real benefit for banks, charities, and
had the potential for a painless implementa-
tion. He was highly interested from the start
and was soon on board, bringing his expertise
in payments and large network in the financial
services arena to ChangeIt.
The business model for this revolutionary
giving program is to offer the program through
a customer’s bank. For the banks, Kitchen sees
this as one of a very select number of pro-
grams that can concurrently deliver business
value while also enhancing a Bank’s corporate
social responsibility initiatives. Banks are typi-
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