Vida Bancomer

Vida Bancomer helps the user to take advantage of Bancomer’s benefits that are relevant for him at the right moment and place.

Innovation presentation

Vida Bancomer is a new intelligent app to help users on finding more than 100K locations with benefits and rewards across the country for Bancomer cardholders, so users keep buying the same they do… but cheaper. Here the customer can check for promotions, both nearby or elsewhere, interact with them and receive recommendation by push messages base on its behavior, location, profile and context.

Since Bancomer’s more than five loyalty programs are not quite well understood by customers and their information is managed and stored in different ways, Vida Bancomer surges as the main effort to standardize processes of input, treatment, storage and management of information in order to show one single experience for everything: a simple and useful mobile app.

Our main comparisons in Mexico are Amex Mobile, which let the user check offers nearby, and Club Premier Gana KmP, which also offers the chance to participate on bids. None of them has the volume and diversity of promotions nor the technology developed on Vida Bancomer that includes Geofencing, PUSH messages with personalized campaigns based on behavior, Usage analytics, Crashes analytics, identification without Login by other Bancomer apps’ communication and use of Google APIs.

It was a huge project across technology and business areas. Leaded by a 7-members scrum from Digital Banking there close to 50 people involved from very diverse departments such as Technology development, Data quality assurance, CRM, Mainframe, Architecture, Campaigns, Commercial Intelligence, Marketing, Acquiring bank, Issuing bank, Loyalty programs, Global payments, Mobile banking among others.

Uniqueness of the project

As an incremental innovation, Vida Bancomer is easing the experience of being cardholder on the biggest mexican bank and no other bank is investing as much effort on improving the loyalty experience.

Automatic processes were built for capturing information from 5 different sources by consuming APIs, web services, analytics processes and an auto-servicing web portal.

We are also taking advantage of our online credit evaluation tool, our state-of-the-art online event notifications motor and we have putted a team working on creating responsive campaigns based on a mix of “macro” profiling and “micro” behavior.

On the app side, we added proximity marketing technology to the app (GPS geofencing and beacons) and we’re designing a new level of behavior analytics with proximity tracking, trending searched topics and similar results, everything for a better app customization.

The Reason Behind

Bancomer loyalty programs are confusing for customers and they understand “Puntos Bancomer” as the only benefits, passing on discounts, payment promotions and free stuff, so we decided to simplify the experience on a very friendly app; not a promotion catalog, but a smart mobile app.

Then, we found that our alliances with merchants were informed to customers by weekly e-mails with low rate of relevancy, since the target was defined only by “macro” customer profiles, so we added an inbox to the app to add three more dimensions: location, on-time payments’ behavior and on time notifications.

Results

It’s too early to quantify success and we are still building reports to measure real profit, but in only three months we have achieved the following:

● 50K users that tried the app in just 3 months

● 4 upgrade versions so far

● 60% on app retention

More important is that we took a step towards simplicity and transparency, both internal and from customer’s perspective. This project has touched several areas that used to work by themselves; now they are able to see the whole picture, from negotiating a new alliance, its impact on customers, alignment on communication and all the operative and technology processes involved to excel the customer experience.