Page 114 - Pay Magazine s2014

mobile money
special section Kaboom! Mobile Meets Loyalty
Mobile Channel, Social Media Ignite Merchant- Funded Offers
Merchant-funded, card-linked offers have been a core loyalty tool for financial institutions for years, but
consumers’ interest has soared in the last 18 months, as mobile apps and social media drive millions more new users to rely on smartphones to monitor their financial accounts and shop.
Whereas card-linked offers previ- ously may have been buried within a financial institution’s monthly statements or online account access page, now they’re highly visible within mobile apps and social media. And as consumers get more familiar with spotting deals while out and about, redemp- tion rates are mounting, according to loyalty experts.
Cardlytics, edo Interactive and Cartera Commerce—three examples in the financial institution-centered card-linked offer arena—are seeing surges in consumer engagement this year, with record numbers of merchants also coming onboard.
The Mobile Revolution
But analysts say the competition to
get consumers’ attention for digital deals is intensifying. Mobile devices are igniting not just financial institu- tion-based card offers, but develop- ment of new integrated retail loyalty and payments concepts like MCX, coming from major merchants including Walmart and Target Corp., Richard Crone, a principal with Crone Consulting LLC, points out. Though it’s early days, all types of digital deals are rapidly becoming more strategic, targeted to an individual’s physical location and his intention to buy something, with data analysis engines to track and analyze the deals’ effectiveness.
“This is a revolution, with mobile connecting consumers for the first time to customized deals through card-linked offers and merchants’ own apps, when they’re actually in a store or restaurant, ready to buy,” Crone says.
Card-linked offer companies— keenly aware of their opportunity
to capitalize on financial institutions’ close connections to customers who trust them and the deep visibility they have into cardholders’ overall spending patterns—are responding
by ramping up their clients and merchant deals.
Atlanta-based Cardlytics this year expanded its client list, which includes more than 4,000 mostly brick-and-mortar merchants and nearly 400 financial institutions, including Bank of America, PNC, Regions Bank and prepaid card issuer NetSpend, as well as Intuit and bank services providers FIS and Fiserv. Cardlytics recently closed
its first deal outside the U.S., with Lloyds Banking Group planning to add its card-linked offers platform in the U.K. The company is seeking additional international opportuni- ties, according to Kasey Byrne, Cardlytics’ chief marketing officer.
Security, Privacy
Cardlytics emphasizes privacy
and security, mining financial institutions’ cardholder bases to analyze transaction patterns to help
112