Planned Serendipity, Inc. launched in 1999 in Columbus, Ohio. As President and CEO, Jeff Kister has over 30 years of experience:

  • Providing business consulting services to startups through Fortune 500 companies in the financial (credit card, gift card, and insurance), retail, and charity industries
  • Launching and growing an eCommerce company in a new industry
Jeff Kister, President & CEO

HIGHLIGHTS

  • New Business Development:
    • Corporate: Created or helped assemble 4-person business teams up to 45-person departments, including establishing visions, missions, and goals; managing personnel; establishing processes and procedures; forecasting and managing budgets; developing reporting; and delivering results
    • Startup: Launched one of the first gift card secondary-market companies in 2005. Read about his sites in the The New York Times (“Capitalism at work …”) and The Washington Post (“Unwanted Presents Find Homes…“)
  • New Capability Development:
    • Helped create new credit card capabilities: Frictionless Mobile Credit (pre-populating consumer information to save keystrokes), Driver’s License Account Lookup, and Co-brand Account Lookup
  • Data Science:
    • Developed monitoring alerting tool to identify key credit card acquisition and account lookup performance issues, plus instituted issue resolution process that saved over $4 million to the bottom-line
  • Performance Optimization:
    • Pioneered reporting for orphaned Account Lookup capability with $5+ billion in credit sales
    • Established a multi-part strategy to optimize Account Lookup performance through integration, search criteria, and store and web optimization, plus identified opportunities to improve sales by $300-400 million
  • Customer Marketing: Supported multi-brand Fortune 500 retailer with building 160 million customer database, campaign strategic plans, budgets, campaign cadence, and cross-selling, plus standardized incremental performance measurement
  • Charity Industry: Launched a website to entice consumers to donate gift cards to charities. Pitched program to 47 national charities and landed the March of Dimes Foundation, Operation Smile, and 25 local charities
  • Insurance: Began his career in the actuarial department of a life insurance subsidiary of the Farmers Insurance Group. Completed three Society of Actuary examinations
  • International: Sourced products from China and consulted with Canadian manufacturer