Case Studies

Collinson was approached by First Abu Dhabi Bank, the largest bank in the United Arab Emirates, to develop a unified, bank-wide loyalty experience that would increase customer satisfaction, drive desired customer behaviours and increase customer value. The result was FAB Rewards, a unique programme that has a portfolio of redemption options and allows its members to “earn faster and on everything”. Unlike many other bank loyalty programmes, customers are rewarded beyond spending for their behaviours such as taking out a personal loan, registering to the FAB Mobile app and online banking channels, debit and credit card spending and salary transfers, to name a few. Three of our key technology solutions power the programme: the award-winning Realtime-XLS, and our loyalty commerce platforms, SmartRedeem Store, and SmartRedeem Travel. This technology helps FAB to deliver superior customer engagement through rewards, offers, payments, and data backed by our own global merchant networks.

Raiffeisen Bank of Romania ‘vision is to own the most relevant, innovative, and successful digital financial ecosystem in the Romanian banking industry and thereby become the number one loyalty application, and the preferred financial ecosystem, in Romania.

Raiffeisen Smart Market was launched in May 2022 as a digital-first, fully integrated loyalty programme, delivering personalised merchant-funded offers and bank-wide loyalty features through innovative technology. Collinson was appointed to deploy its Realtime-XLS loyalty solution, leveraging API-based integration and advanced third-party AI capabilities.

Realtime-XLS loyalty platform includes an innovative loyalty mobile app that provides hyper-personalised and geolocated offers to programme members, an Offers Management Portal, and a reporting tool for the marketing operator to monitor the programme’s KPIs, a Merchant Portal to be deployed at a later stage.

Raiffeisen Smart Market rewards customers for all transactions they make with their payment cards, as well as for all interactions with the bank (products subscriptions, services, and channels usage). Customers can activate push notifications to receive alerts for geo-located offers in stores nearby, providing access to ‘real-time’ relevant offers which include discounts, cash back and points or prizes from Raiffeisen Bank and its retail partners.

Azul first worked with us in 2013 when they relaunched their FFP and we’ve been working with them as a strategic partner since. In 2018, Azul asked us to build a new and improved CRM for their restructured FFP business unit. Their challenge was getting the proper data and analysis to measure and track performance in order to identify new opportunities, products, and campaigns. Data quality and structure were also a challenge. To resolve this, we allocated a dedicated team of data, travel and loyalty experts to work from Azul’s office. After discussing the data needs with Azul’s entire FFP team, we built automated dashboards for each business unit, from high level to deeper analyses and indicators. Our team has also been developing COVID-19 specific dashboards, tracking performance and behaviour changes, identifying new revenue opportunities and supporting the airline unit, with the aim of helping recovery.

We aggregated 55 million passenger records, billions of possible journey paths and the co-ordinates of 7,000 airports to uncover traveller insights. We identified 7 million switchable passengers for Changi Airport and together we launched Changi Rewards Travel, the first ever international airport loyalty programme for transit/transfer travellers.

The food and beverage offering in airport lounges is a core benefit of our Travel Experience programmes. However, when social distancing became the norm, buffet-style dining became impractical. In September 2020, Collinson launched a pilot digital ordering solution, Ready 2 Order, so that members could still enjoy a meal before catching a flight. The pilot is now live across several key regions (in Mexico, USA, India and the UK) with three more locations going live in March (one in the UK and two in Saudi Arabia). How it works

• Member enters lounge, scans QR code with their mobile device and the relevant menu is surfaced

• The member can choose the meal they’d like and place the order

• Lounge staff are alerted with new orders and the meal is prepared and delivered to the member at their table

V.Ships, the global leader in ship management and marine services, first joined forces with us in 2012 to provide their clients with complimentary access to airport lounges across the world with our corporate Priority Pass programme.

The programme renews each year, at which point new Priority Pass cards are sent out to the members' home addresses. As many members are frequent travellers and not often home to receive their new cards, we established that the Priority Pass wholesale digital programme would better suit, giving instant access to global airport lounges via a Digital Membership Card. A smooth transition to the digital programme was carried out seamlessly in December 2020 and we made sure that throughout the process members were able to continue accessing lounges. Members were prompted to complete a brief online registration form in order to instantly download their Priority Pass Digital Membership Card, enabling them to have card-free access to over 1,600+ lounges worldwide.

Asia Miles, Cathay Pacific’s travel and lifestyle rewards programme in Asia, was looking to drive greater satisfaction and enrich their members’ lives through expanding points earning and redemption to include non-air partnerships and non-air redemption. The wide network of partners enabled Asia Miles to broaden their redemption options and ensure relevant and exciting new offerings. We did this by seamlessly enabling access to their established partnership affiliation network, which offers an extensive range of rewards and redemption options, via the Asia Miles’ iRedeem store. Access to our online rewards platform, SmartEarn, was also embedded into Asia Miles’ online earning stores to further enable points earning. These actions opened up 1,800 rewards and 1,300 merchants located within 12 Asian countries and regions. The member base also grew to over 10 million worldwide.

Wanting to stand out among the competition, Bank Mandiri introduced a functionally rich loyalty programme to complement and increase the use of their products while providing growth in market share and revenues.

They also wanted to grow their acquiring market share by offering loyalty functionality as a value-added proposition to their merchants. The challenge was to increase retail payments on their debit and credit cards, both as an issuer and acquirer, and improve usage of their other core banking products in a highly competitive market, where customers are spoilt for options.

Using our Realtime-XLS solution, the bank could easily configure highly flexible earn rules and reward types to incentivise card usage, leading to an increase in the number of retail payment transactions and the average purchase amount.

By providing their customers with numerous banking channels to check and redeem their points easily, the bank was able to manage multiple loyalty programmes for various products through a single platform, plus access comprehensive reporting for easier monitoring of various KPIs.

Bank Mandiri saw increased transaction fee-based revenues thanks to higher card transaction volumes. Customer satisfaction, engagement and overall relationships were also improved, and merchants increased their participation in the loyalty programme.

We started working with Flying Blue in 2012 when we provided them with the technology to support a new e-commerce store where members could redeem their Flying Blue Miles for merchandise. Initially the store was stocked with products sourced from its own partners, but in 2014 we suggested upgrading the store to a new version of SmartRedeem, increasing the rewards available from 250 to over 4000 products. We combined rewards sourced from the airline’s strategic partners with products and experiences from hundreds of global brands. We also updated the digital features for an easier shopping experience, with dynamic and localised content, including language and locally available rewards. Using iFrame technology, we made redemption possible on dynamically priced inventory, such as car rentals.

Alpha Bank is a long-standing client of ours. We started collaborating with them back in 2006. The bank wanted to develop a coalition loyalty programme to engage their customers, and reward them for their everyday spend, with multiple types and sizes of merchants across Greece.

Through our Realtime-XLS solution, we provided a points-based, multi-partner, multi-scheme card-loyalty programme combining real-time earning and burning capabilities.

This included innovative point-of-sale based earn and burn. The real-time features brought the Bonus programme to the next level, increasing convenience and engagement with customers in meaningful ways, thanks to innovative customer behaviour profiling and segmenting tools.

Since the programme also rewards customers for their usage of banking products, Alpha Bank has also managed to issue around 20,000 Bonus rewards Alpha term deposits with a capital of more than 850 million Euros.

In 2018, Alpha Bank redesigned and rebranded the Bonus programme to deliver an even better experience for members through a state-of-the-art mobile app, driving more value and interactions with their customers.

In 2019, Alpha Bank was named Best Issuing Bank in Southern Europe (IFC), and the Best Bank in Greece for 2020 by Euromoney publication.

Alpha Bank has recently begun extending their loyalty initiative into new countries in the Balkans, starting with Romania.

LATAM Pass came to us looking for ways to improve their non-air earn and burn propositions. They envisioned a marketplace where members could easily browse partnerships that would allow them to collect and use LATAM Pass miles. When they approached us, the LATAM Pass was a single page within the airline’s website. It had limited flexibility to feature, sort or search for partners or products. In addition, each country had its own redemption platform, making operational processes and results monitoring extremely challenging. We expanded on and developed the LATAM Pass site for five countries (Chile, Argentina, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia). It now features simple and elegant UX and allows LATAM complete flexibility in how the pages are structured. We also applied our SmartRedeem Store and brought in a consistent user experience to all LATAM Pass members, regardless of market. LATAM Pass now has the tools and technical infrastructure to maximise the performance of their partnerships.

The main goal of OCBC Bank was to increase card usage in a competitive market, while improving the customer experience by giving points and monetary rebates. The business also needed a solution to accommodate the multiple loyalty programmes which they were running.

We implemented our flexible loyalty solution, Realtime-XLS, which supports multi-channel, real-time earn and burn capabilities as well as bank wide features for customers. The solution was tightly integrated with their IT system and was tailored so that it could deliver against their specific requirements which included strong configuration flexibility.

Thanks to Collinson’s Realtime-XLS platform, they were able to, not only launch programmes that matched sophisticated requirements, but also to deliver new, innovative features year after year. Realtime-XLS is OCBC Bank’s only loyalty solution in Singapore.

CR Land wanted an experience-based, industry-leading loyalty programme in the Chinese market, to support growth for their commercial real estate business and their tenant partners. The chosen loyalty experts needed to have retail industry experience and a strong understanding of the Chinese market. Although a loyalty programme already existed, it was not able to support the rapid expansion of the group's real estate, which had grown from one mall to over 20. With a broad range of customer groups and operation capabilities between the malls, a sustainable, adaptable programme built on data analysis was needed.

After gaining a deep understanding of operational capabilities and customer preferences, and conducting competitor analysis, the programme was re-shaped; including membership levels, points earning and equity, supporting technology, and financial management. This result was a unified, rewarding customer experience across the portfolio, enhanced loyalty through an improved rewards strategy, and increased spending for both CR Land and their tenant partners.

As an accessible luxury brand Hackett’s customer frequency is low but with a higher average transaction value than other high street brands. With these challenges in mind Hackett wanted the 65B loyalty programme to work harder for its members and to use it to help them understand the value of their customers. Collinson modelled and recommended an index scoring for each member based on eight behavioural attributes that went beyond recency, frequency and monetary. The member value score is then grouped into cohorts to create a member value hierarchy represented in a one to five star rating, with five being the most valuable members. This deeper understanding has enabled store managers to individually target members based on their behaviour, either recognising an increase in rating as well as using re-engagement tactics when a drop is observed.

We’ve been working with Radisson for nearly 20 years. Recently we helped them to automate their email marketing campaigns allowing them to communicate in a more personalised way while working within constrained budgets and limited resources. We created a more efficient process for constructing and approving their 100 million+ annual emails in EMEA, increasing personalisation and producing a greater number of campaigns and variants in order to better engage with their two million marketable members.

Having built a successful partnership with Ireland’s largest Health Insurer Vhi, we were approached with the opportunity to underwrite their dental insurance portfolio and provide claims servicing. We worked together to help them develop a competitive advantage for their dental product by uncovering the needs of their customer base and the dental practices. Competition is strong in the Irish market and Vhi were looking for new ways to differentiate their proposition. We were able to implement a comprehensive network of dental practices and facilitate direct payment of claims, making life considerably easier for Vhi customers at the point of claim. Alongside product enhancements and a fresh underwriting approach, we now jointly offer a range of company and self-pay cover options, and include new benefits such as oral cancer care. These are further supported by our Collinson dentist, network manager and dedicated claims team.