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When you’re serving top-
tier retail clients in 50 countries, you’d better have a flexible platform, says Mark Schatz, president of Louisville, Ky.-based Stored Value Solutions. The company built its platform more than 20 years ago with flex- ibility in mind, and its continued investments in technology have enabled its retail partners to in- tegrate their stored value programs with myriad loyalty and CRM plat- forms, mobile apps and more.
MARK SCHATZ
That flexibility extends to the almost limitless possibilities for promotions that ride on SVS’s rails. Dynamic promotions—which could represent monetary value,
a discount at a specific time or a coupon for a specific item—are what’s driving retail strategy around closed-loop programs today, according to Schatz.
“Our clients have specific ideas about how they want loyalty and promotions to work. We’re not try- ing to put round pegs into square holes. That’s critical,” says Schatz. “When you look at that in the
context of what can be done to deliver dynamic promotions on
our platform, we can wrap around a lot of feature functionality.” Whether clients want to target customers to come in at a particu- lar time of day—down to a specific minute—or offer a promotion for
a specific time period or stores in certain locations, SVS can ac- commodate. “The possibilities of driving behavior of existing
SucceSS on a Global Scale
customers or acquiring new cus- tomers by utilizing those types of promotional tools are very exciting,” he adds.
Overall, SVS promotional cards have an average redemption rate of 32 percent compared with
a 1-7 percent rate for paper coupons. Incentive-based offers boost gift card sales 24 percent on average.
volume 8 • spring 2015
processor Stored Value Solutions spotlight
Dynamic Promotions Drive Results
Driving success for retail clients across 50 countries, 26 currencies and languages requires significant commitment—not only of funds but resources and time.
“Anybody who doesn’t understand the differences across global markets
is going to fail miserably,” says Stored Value Solutions President Mark Schatz.
What has helped SVS grow to process 1.5 billion transactions for 600 card programs annually has been a configur- able platform that was built to handle that complexity along with significant in-market resources.
“We get a lot of scale by virtue of how we’ve configured the platform, but it’s also about investing in putting folks on the ground for sales, service and
card production to support the work in different regions,” says Schatz. It’s also critical to understand how retailers are structured and how they make decisions in each region in which they operate.
Schatz says FleetCor’s purchase of its parent company Comdata last summer has only helped SVS, which continues to run as a standalone entity. “I work directly with FleetCor CEO Ron Clarke and he has made sure we have all the resources we need to continue to grow,” Schatz says. “He gets that it’s a fundamentally different business and he continues to evaluate spinoff possibilities.”
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