About
Plink is an intelligent, data and analytical driven platform, that brings value to merchants and consumer in order to optimize the daily retail purchases, by bringing powerful insights to the merchants helping them improve their sales, offers and marketing strategies, and bringing consumers the most relevant and specific offers based on their consumer profile and preferences.
Innovation presentation
Plink is a platform that brings together two main players - merchants and consumers - providing value to both based on the vast amount and richness of data Bancolombia has on Colombian consumers and retail businesses, and our analytics and AI capabilities.
For the merchants Plink provides access to a wealth of information on the health of their business, how their sales are evolving, how they compare with their competitors, who their customers are (demographics, income, profession, etc.), where they live (through heat maps of their customers locations), purchasing habits, etc. All in very powerful graphics, very easy to read and interpret, in order to take help them take the best decisions on their business. And on top of receiving critical this information, they can "upload" offers to Plink, like a special discount using a particular payment type on a particular day of the week.
Plink, using a machine learning algorithm, pushes each offer to the "right customers". Since we know the habits of 10 million customers of Bancolombia, we send the right offers to the relevant customers only, via the Plink app. E.g. if Peter typically buys movie tickets, he will most likely receive movie theater offers, and he might not receive live music concerts if he that is not in his preferences profile. Based on a rating system on the app, and on actual redemption of offers, the ML algorithm will learn and refine preferences profiles.
Monetization comes from merchants: we provide a freemium model, with a basic tier of reports for free, and more advanced reports for a monthly fee. User will never pay to access the offers.
Uniqueness of the project
Plink is our first platform business model, and the first in the banking sector in Colombia.
We have been able to combine very powerful yet simple tools to provide a huge value to two critical customers for the bank: merchants (most of them SMB) and end consumers, all by making an appropriate use of:
- consumers and merchants data, all within the data privacy regulations and never revealing consumers or merchants information at an individual level, only using aggregated and statistical information.
- Analytics to provide insights to merchants on the health of their business in very simple intuitive ways that allows them to take daily decisions.
- Machine Learning algorithm to empower a recommendations engine to push only the right offers to each consumer, that will always improve its accuracy.
