Currency Alliance

DECEMBER 19, 2022

AI is much talked about. It has the potential to address a lot of business challenges, and enable many forms of elusive innovation in loyalty marketing. The biggest opportunities for loyalty programs relate to operating more efficiently to reduce cost, and improving personalization. Most larger loyalty programs have been experimenting with artificial intelligence for years now, and value has been found around personalization and fraud management.

Loyalty 52

Loyalty Marketing Airlines Loyalty Programs 52

Currency Alliance

NOVEMBER 4, 2022

On 13 th of November 2022, the interchange charges on credit card transactions in New Zealand will be capped at 0.8%. This fee is commonly how financial services brands have funded their loyalty rewards for at least the past decade. So how should New Zealand’s banks and brands respond, and how should other brands collaborate with partners to reduce dependency on any single source of funding?

Loyalty 52

Loyalty Marketing Loyalty Programs Banking 52

Currency Alliance

OCTOBER 31, 2022

A recent article on PhocusWire helpfully outlined a range of security vulnerabilities common to loyalty programs. Some of them were matters of procedure and staff training – which are clearly important – but many were technological vulnerabilities which can be avoided by using modern tools and systems. Securing loyalty systems is important because of the value of points/miles held by brands and consumers – which makes them attractive to fraudsters – and the significant indirect costs assoc

Travel 52

Travel System Loyalty Loyalty Programs 52

Currency Alliance

AUGUST 22, 2022

The Points Bank in a loyalty program is the module of software that keeps track of all transactions related to issuing, redeeming, or exchanging points among loyalty program members, partners and other stakeholders. This module maintains the ledgers so that all the transactions, a customer’s points balance, and the outstanding liability of the loyalty program are properly recorded and reported.

Banking 52

Banking Loyalty Loyalty Programs Airlines 52

Currency Alliance

MAY 9, 2022

Digital transformation’ has been the buzzword for the last decade in enterprise strategy. The phrase is pleasing to shareholders and may sound exciting to employees, but delivering on it takes time and resources. So, to demonstrate some progress, many organizations have pursued initiatives that are only cosmetic in nature while not truly taking advantage of what digital transformation enables: namely that customer journeys, partnerships, trading ecosystems, etc. can be reinvented to improve the

Loyalty 52

Loyalty Technology Loyalty Programs Multi-Channel 52

Currency Alliance

MARCH 30, 2022

In a recent keynote speech to the graduating class of Founder Institute – Barcelona , I talked about the traits that have served me best in my career as an entrepreneur. The ability to innovate with scant resources – and constantly leaning on others for help. The importance of networking in order to build potential and active partnerships. The confidence to make many small bets, relying on judgement and diversification to ensure that overall, they pay off.

Loyalty 52

Loyalty Loyalty Programs Resources Airlines 52

Currency Alliance

NOVEMBER 16, 2021

Flexibility around loyalty redemptions is crucial to creating meaningful value for every customer. Rewards that are interesting for less-frequent customers, as well as to frequent customers, motivate every customer to engage more, and increase the share of wallet that they allocate to your brand. Reward catalogs, and the redemptions included, generate this motivation via the merchandised and shoppable experience of a commerce environment.

Loyalty 52

Loyalty Loyalty Programs Ecommerce Touchpoint 52

Currency Alliance

DECEMBER 7, 2021

Did you hear the term ‘Big Data’ during 2021 (or 2020 for that matter)? I heard it once, two weeks ago at a loyalty conference in London. Loyalty trends were being discussed, as well as what had been hot topics in prior years – some of which just faded away as fads. The conversation gave me pause to reflect on what exactly is a trend, how applicable are trends in Southeast Asia to brands in Europe, and whether embracing the hype around the latest trends could actually distract companies fr

Loyalty 52

Loyalty Trends Loyalty Programs Touchpoint 52

Currency Alliance

NOVEMBER 16, 2021

Flexibility around loyalty redemptions is crucial to creating meaningful value for every customer. Rewards that are interesting for less-frequent customers, as well as to frequent customers, motivate every customer to engage more, and increase the share of wallet that they allocate to your brand. Redemption catalogs, and the rewards included, generate this motivation via the merchandised and shoppable experience of a commerce environment.

Loyalty 52

Loyalty Loyalty Programs Ecommerce Touchpoint 52

Currency Alliance

NOVEMBER 15, 2021

Commercetools partners with Currency Alliance to enable loyalty marketing in the age of composable commerce. Every company strives to build loyalty among its customers, but the methods to achieve the never-ending pursuit of loyal customers can vary widely. Because each customer segment will respond differently to available loyalty incentives, tailoring the customer experience by segment across channels is essential to maximize ROI.

Loyalty 52

Loyalty Loyalty Programs Multi-Channel Banking 52

Currency Alliance

OCTOBER 12, 2021

Loyalty partnerships with complementary brands are the best way to create additional value, for customers and for your business. Depending on the maturity of your loyalty program, you may already have some program partners, or be a partner in somebody else’s program. Or, you may be considering whether embarking on some partnerships could be the right move.

Loyalty 59

Loyalty Loyalty Programs Airlines Travel 59

Currency Alliance

APRIL 10, 2021

If a new CEO replaced you tomorrow, and had no previous connection to the current loyalty program, what changes do you think she would make? As CEO, the time you can dedicate to your loyalty program is probably close to zero. But as a four-time CEO myself, I know that even 30 minutes a month, to ask the right questions and get my team executing brilliantly, is time well-spent.

Loyalty 52

Loyalty Marketing Loyalty Programs Touchpoint 52

Currency Alliance

MAY 19, 2021

Modifying legacy loyalty technology, to enable consistent and relevant engagement across the expanding number of customer-facing platforms, is becoming cost-prohibitive. The only efficient path forward is to put headless technology in front of your legacy systems – or, to migrate altogether. Less-technical businesspeople may only care about loyalty technology to the degree that it serves two key objectives: Delivering a consistently good brand experience across all customer touchpoints.

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Loyalty Touchpoint Loyalty Programs Social Media 52

Currency Alliance

FEBRUARY 26, 2021

Most people understand what incentives are and how best to use them, but they don’t understand why the entire industry came about. During the 1970s in most developed countries, the availability of goods and services exceeded demand for the first time. This meant that companies could no longer just put anything on the shelves and expect it to sell. Therefore, all types of marketing and sales disciplines started to evolve to incentivize and influence customer choice in order to drive more revenue.

Loyalty 59

Loyalty Customer Engagement Engagement Airlines 59

Currency Alliance

MARCH 9, 2021

Headless loyalty systems are API-first loyalty platforms that enable any customer-facing platform to integrate loyalty marketing functionality into their Customer Experience (CX) via API. Building adaptive loyalty marketing functionality is increasingly complicated and necessary, as loyalty points become a new asset class, and loyalty commerce between complementary brands gains traction.

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Loyalty Customer Engagement Engagement CRM 59

Currency Alliance

FEBRUARY 10, 2021

If a new CEO replaced you tomorrow, and had no previous connection to the current loyalty program, what changes do you think she would make? This person would not be suffering from cognitive entrenchment and would revisit every opportunity to create more value. We hear loyalty leaders state all the time that they have embraced ‘best practices’. In my opinion, if someone believes they have reached ‘best practice’, then they typically stop thinking about how to create more value for all stakeholde

Loyalty Programs 52

Loyalty Programs Loyalty How To Touchpoint 52

Currency Alliance

JANUARY 18, 2021

Other than the number of rooms booked, how much do hoteliers know about their guests? How much must they know by 2025 to not become a commodity? It’s time for hotel operators to re-evaluate how well their ace in the hole – their loyalty program – is enabling every function of their business to deliver more value. Here are three predictions of how loyalty programs must evolve in hospitality.

Hospitality 52

Hospitality Loyalty Industry Hotels 52

Currency Alliance

DECEMBER 1, 2020

Apart from adapting to mobile apps and ditching plastic cards, the typical loyalty programs in 2020 still operate pretty much the same as they did at the turn of the century. And there are many, many more of these lookalike programs. If companies want their programs to generate profit in five years, they should start adapting these six characteristics now.

Loyalty Programs 52

Loyalty Programs Loyalty Multi-Channel Hotels 52

Currency Alliance

NOVEMBER 17, 2020

If 2020 has taught us anything it is that diversification (or luck from being in the right sector) can be a lifeline. It allows us to keep customers engaged when business plans fly out the window, due to marketplace calamities, such as the Covid-19 pandemic. In November 2019 when we published the Top Trends for 2020 , we could not have known about the Covid-19 pandemic.

Loyalty 52

Loyalty Trends Loyalty Programs Travel 52

Currency Alliance

OCTOBER 12, 2020

About three years ago, I was flying from Barcelona to New York on United Airlines. As we were descending into New York, five flight attendants approached my seat in the back of the plane and they said, “Are you Mr. Ehredt?”. I said, “well yes, I am”, and they said, “we wanted to congratulate you for reaching one million actual miles on United’s flight today.

Loyalty 98

Loyalty Marketing Loyalty Programs Banking 98

Currency Alliance

JULY 16, 2020

Most marketing efforts produce conversion rates of less than 5%, signaling a crisis of communication with a make-or-break number of potential loyal customers. This article explains how loyalty partnerships among complementary brands can produce more comprehensive customer understanding that drives down cost while strengthening engagement – and how to apportion loyalty investments.

ROI 52

ROI Loyalty Data Loyalty Programs 52

Currency Alliance

JUNE 16, 2020

For most of the last decade, loyalty marketing seemed to be on autopilot for many brands – but the tide is turning. Many of the entrants to this years’ Loyalty Magazine Awards were as adept with data and technology as marketers in many other disciplines. What really stood out is which brands were pulling off these feats. While travel and retail brands have made a lot of progress in the last 24 months, the bulk of innovation has come from other consumer sectors – including media businesses, enter

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Loyalty Innovation Travel Loyalty Programs 52

Currency Alliance

JUNE 1, 2020

The long break in spending habits due to Covid-19 will cause customers to re-evaluate their relationship with brands. People in Barcelona are buying a lot more ice-cream lately. From my balcony in the evening, it looks like 2 in 10 are enjoying an ice-cream cone. One year ago, there might have been 2 people in 50. This isn’t just a casual observation, but a sign of a widespread consumer trend which every loyalty marketer should be thinking about.

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Loyalty Consumers Marketing Loyalty Programs 72

Currency Alliance

MAY 12, 2020

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Insurance 40

Insurance Government Study Resources 40

Currency Alliance

MARCH 24, 2020

Currency Alliance is offering fee-free exchanges of loyalty currencies, between travel and non-travel brands, for the next six months. Travel brands are suffering from Covid-19 more than most, with the grounding of aircraft, and very low occupancy for those hotels which have not yet closed. But there are things we can do to ease the financial stress of those most affected, give customers hope, and proactively manage loyalty program liability.

Travel 40

Travel Loyalty Programs Airlines Hotels 40

Currency Alliance

MARCH 20, 2020

There are really only four ways to create value for all stakeholders in a loyalty program: maintain low operating costs, and funnel the savings into rewards. add complementary partners in every spending category so the program and the currency are more useful and interesting. share customer insight among partners, so you know how to maximize lifetime value for each customer, and can create more personalized engagement. source aspirational redemption options at better cost, so the value of your l

Loyalty Programs 52

Loyalty Programs Loyalty Hotels Travel 52

Currency Alliance

FEBRUARY 10, 2020

One of the earliest loyalty programs came out of the grocery sector. S&H’s began selling their Green Stamps to retailers in 1896. In some ways, it’s surprising how little the supermarket industry has moved on. Broadly speaking, most of the chains’ loyalty efforts have been in proprietary, albeit digitalized versions of the original S&H program: collecting in order to redeem for rewards, some digital couponing, and pushing out offers via a mobile app.

Loyalty Programs 52

Loyalty Programs Loyalty How To Hotels 52

Currency Alliance

JANUARY 22, 2020

The top loyalty jobs are tough. Why so? Every CEO waxes lyrical about the importance of loyalty. Every CFO knows a loyal customer is many times more profitable than others. That ought to make your job easier. And yet, many loyalty programs are run like barnacles on the side of a business: battling for budget, rather than being nurtured as the core way to engage customers via every channel and touchpoint.

Loyalty 40

Loyalty Brands Loyalty Programs Rewards Programs 40

Currency Alliance

DECEMBER 17, 2019

This is the blog version of our Loyalty Strategy Guide 2020. For a more engaging read, click here to Currency Alliance Loyalty Strategy Guide 2020. There was a mix of good and bad, for loyalty in 2019. Much of the bad has derived from a lack of belief or understanding from CEOs, who constrain budgets, and prop up short-term earnings with value that ought to flow to customers.

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Loyalty Strategy Loyalty Programs Travel 64

Currency Alliance

NOVEMBER 14, 2019

The overarching loyalty trend of 2020 will continue to be brands getting to grips with digital transformation. If that sounds like loyalty is late to the party, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. In ‘Why so many digital transformations fail’, Harvard Business Review cites : inordinate wastage on proprietary technology. disconnects between company leadership and management. and a kind of digital ‘goldrush’ without proper strategy.

Loyalty 40

Loyalty Trends Loyalty Programs Hotels 40

Currency Alliance

OCTOBER 29, 2019

The following quote baffles my mind: According to IRI Worldwide, 74% of consumers globally choose a store based on its effective loyalty programme.[i]. If 74% of consumers choose a store based on their loyalty program, then why do few loyalty programs have more than 25% of their customers participating? The answer is simple. Customers are interested in earning a meaningful amount of value, but the value they receive does not meet minimum expectations – so people quit.

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Loyalty Loyalty Programs How To Hotels 40

Currency Alliance

SEPTEMBER 17, 2019

In this new content series, we show what a world-beating loyalty program would look like in four different sectors, and discuss the brands currently showing the potential to build that ‘world-beating’ program. First up: the travel & hospitality sector. Travel is one of the most venerable loyalty sectors – so it may surprise some that leading brands often approach Currency Alliance, asking for help to find additional loyalty partners.

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Loyalty Programs Travel Loyalty Airlines 40

Currency Alliance

AUGUST 16, 2019

Loyalty programs once enabled relatively personalized marketing. From a standing start of zero customer data some 20 years ago, brands became able to incentivize desired behaviors in highly-predictable customer segments. They did this by embarking on ‘no-brainer’ partnerships: where the customer journey is so linear (think airline + car rental) or the customer frequency so high (think grocery store + fast-casual dining) that a brand partnership creates obvious value.

Loyalty 40

Loyalty Brands Loyalty Programs Airlines 40

Currency Alliance

JUNE 19, 2019

This was my second year on the judging panel at the Loyalty Magazine Awards. Really, for those relatively few brands achieving impressive levels of customer engagement, it’s breath-taking how fast the industry has progressed in such a short time. The casual observer at last night’s ceremony (and the professional one alike) would have been struck by the many extraordinary, showpiece technological achievements which were made in the past year.

Loyalty 49

Loyalty Loyalty Programs Gamification Airlines 49

Currency Alliance

JUNE 11, 2019

A 2018 Collinson study reported that 66% of financial services professionals say their bank “does not understand why customers are loyal or have a strategy to strengthen customer relationships”[i]. People are more likely to leave their spouse than their bank[ii], so it might seem that banks have no case to answer. Actually, they do. Many consumers now ‘multibank’[iii], keeping their traditional provider on-hand for the same reasons they always did, but branching out in search of enhanced value.

Banking 40

Banking Loyalty Consumers Loyalty Programs 40

Currency Alliance

MAY 9, 2019

Last December, a McKinsey report said that 2018 represented… “…a tipping point from thinking, talking about, and planning for future mobility to implementing it.…when the automotive and mobility industries shifted from a driver- or owner-focused value proposition to a customer-centered one; and when micromobility started to scale up.” [i]. Of course, until a few years ago, there was no “mobility sector”.

Loyalty 56

Loyalty Strategy Loyalty Programs Airlines 56

Currency Alliance

APRIL 23, 2019

Chuck Ehredt sat down with Steve Hoban, who recently returned to the UK after spending 11 years working for Pick n Pay in South Africa, to discuss brand collaboration in loyalty schemes. The Pick n Pay Smart Shopper loyalty scheme was launched by Steve in 2011 and quickly became the leading loyalty program in the country – in large part because of constant innovation and relevant partnerships with complementary brands.

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