CardBreakageCardbreakage

Promotional value

Promotional credits, vouchers, and incentives

High-velocity issuance with short windows, thin tracking, and marketing accruals that were never validated against actual redemption.

What drives breakage here

The behavior specific to this program type

Short redemption windows

Most promotional value resolves in weeks, so curve shape matters far more than long-run extrapolation.

Campaign heterogeneity

Offer value, audience, and channel differ per campaign, making portfolio averages nearly meaningless.

Conditional redemption

Minimum-spend and eligibility conditions suppress redemption in ways that must be modeled explicitly.

Weak instrumentation

Issuance is often recorded outside the ledger, so the starting population has to be reconstructed before anything can be modeled.

How we analyze it

Our approach for this structure

Every step is built from your own history and reconciled to your reported position.

  1. 01Reconstruct the issued population per campaign, including offers distributed outside core systems.
  2. 02Build redemption curves at campaign level with attention to the first 30 to 90 days.
  3. 03Isolate the effect of conditions and thresholds on realized redemption.
  4. 04Derive forfeiture rates per campaign archetype for forward accrual use.
  5. 05Reconcile modeled promotional cost against booked accruals.
  6. 06Deliver forward-looking accrual guidance by campaign type.

Signals

When an audit is worth running

Accrual variance

Promotional accruals and actual redemption cost diverge consistently period to period.

High issuance volume

You issue credits continuously without a validated forfeiture assumption.

Marketing scale-up

Incentive spend is growing faster than the ability to measure what is actually redeemed.

Engagement

Run your breakage audit

A confidential, analyst-led review of your stored-value liability — expected breakage, redemption behavior, and escheatment exposure quantified against your own data.

No engagement commitment required. Scope is confirmed before work begins.

Run My Breakage AuditReview Methodology