Oh! Gift Card

Where they were

Oh! Gift Card is Argentina’s leading branded currency platform: 10 years in the market, 150+ affiliated brands, 800+ corporate clients, and operations in six countries. Brands like Frávega, Carrefour, AMEX, Samsung, and Red Bull run their gift cards through them. The company wanted to give those brands something more: a fast, secure way to see their own performance. The ask was a dashboard.

What we found

There was no data warehouse. Data lived in transactional MySQL databases, one per country, with Power BI connected straight to production: no separation between the database that runs the business and the one that analyzes it, no dimensional model, no reliable history. Plenty of companies start this way, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The trouble starts when you try to grow on top of it.

Before any visualization, the foundation had to be built. That meant governance work that met resistance at first, since some people would rather have gone straight to the dashboard. It ended up being what makes the system reproducible, auditable, and extensible today.

What we built

An end-to-end data lakehouse on AWS. AWS DMS replicates the six countries’ databases into S3 with incremental CDC, and the data moves through a medallion architecture (Landing, Bronze, Silver, and Gold) on Apache Iceberg tables. Silver holds the dimensional model, with facts like orders, transactions, and the full lifecycle of every gift card. NPS comes in through its own pipeline from Jotform. All infrastructure lives in Terraform.

On top of that, dashboards for the brands with three modules: sales and redemptions, store and channel performance, and NPS, written in the brands’ language rather than the database’s. A beta with Frávega and Carrefour produced 21 concrete feedback items, resolved across four delivery phases. Later we added a multi-country Gold layer for the commercial dashboard in Power BI, which reuses the same business logic instead of duplicating it.

Everything runs at 4:00 AM, every day, for all six countries, with Slack alerts and a daily summary that only says “all good” when everything actually is.

What they can do now

Brands log in and see their own business: how many gift cards were activated, how much money is still unspent, how each store is performing, and what their customers are saying. Oh! can show Frávega exactly how much money is “in the air” and which store is falling behind. That number didn’t exist anywhere before.

New questions no longer start from scratch. The report on 147,403 unredeemed gift cards as of December 31, 2025, broken down by channel and brand, took hours on the same infrastructure. And the commercial team tracks all six countries from a single dashboard.

Why they stayed

The project started as a three-month one-shot and is now past the one-year mark. The extension wasn’t planned: the work kept generating value and there was more to do. After the brand dashboards came the commercial dashboard and the Gold layer, and we’re now designing a platform to centralize the 20+ reports that 10 departments still build by hand. The governance that caused friction early on is what the product team values most. When something is built right, it’s easy to keep building on top.