JUNE 2014
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business elite canada
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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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