mDeals – Europe’s first transactional marketing platform

First European implementation of merchant-funded transactional marketing offering discount value eclipsing traditional banking rewards programs, automatic redemption with card transaction and transactional behavior based offer targeting.

Innovation presentation

Typical rewards programmes offer a wide range of discounts for numerous retailers, but they rarely differ between banks. This makes it harder for consumers to identify different discounts and means that rewards programmes are not a decisive factor when customers are choosing a payment card. In addition, rewards programmes are not attractive for merchants because they offer low discounts to all cardholders, even if they already buy the merchant’s products.

mBank decided to redesign the typical card reward programme. Inspired by the Cardlytics and American Express ‘Link, like, love’ initiative, the project team implemented a system that enables the customer to:

• Choose interesting offers via mobile and online banking channels, as well as Facebook

• Receive relevant offers that are assigned based on transactional behaviour and demographics

• Receive discount value that is better than traditional rewards because the merchant is able to offer discounts to a precise group of customers, rather than to all cardholders

• Automatically redeem the discount by paying with an mBank card. The discount is transferred to the customer’s account as a ‘money back’ transaction

• Receive geolocation-based notifications

• Share discounts with friends via a dedicated Facebook application.

Uniqueness of the project

mDeals offers several unique features that make it the most innovative card discount programme in Poland. These include:

• Practically unlimited discount value: in typical reward programmes, the awards cannot exceed 760 PLN/year due to legal issues. Offers in mDeals are limited to 760 PLN/year per offer, which enables the customer to combine offers and earn whenever they spend

• Rather than receiving a long list of discounts from a wide array of merchants, the transaction-based targeting functionality provides customers with a limited list of relevant offers from retailers they are truly interested in

• Unlike a typical rewards programme where customers have to remind the merchant about the discount, mDeals ensures customers automatically redeem their discounts when they make a payment

• Access to offers via mobile devices, including geolocation-based notifications that alert users to a nearby offer

• The ability to share offers with friends via the Facebook application.

The Reason Behind

mBank decided to launch mDeals for several reasons:

• In the competitive Polish retail banking market, reward programmes had ceased to be one of key differentiators for customers. Although mBank cards offered customers a wide range of discounts, most cardholders were not aware of the partners offering these discounts

• Competitors were offering sophisticated money-back programmes, which were difficult for the customer to understand and only offered limited discount values

• mBank wanted to offer competitive discounts that were truly valuable for the customer, but merchants were unwilling to offer higher rewards in case it cannibalised their customer base. This was because merchants were unable to control who owned the card and they were worried that the cardholders might already have been customers.

Results

One year after it was launched, mDeals became the fastest growing mBank product and an effective marketing tool for merchants. As of April 2014:

• 600,000 customers had signed up for mDeals, making it the fastest growing mBank product ever

• More than 400 campaigns have been executed by over 120 top brands

• 73,000 customers use mDeals via Facebook, making it the fastest growing Polish Facebook application in May 2013

• 2.5 times higher shopping value by customers redeeming the offer in the most effective campaigns.

mDeals has also been recognised by industry experts in both Poland and in other countries. This resulted in more than 700 experts, journalists and bloggers voting for mDeals to win the Best of Show Award at Finovate London.