Interswitch is a leading payment processing company headquartered in Lagos, Nigeria, with a presence throughout several African countries. They were looking for a multi-scheme platform to manage issuer, acquirer and merchant loyalty programmes. The company also wanted to develop and integrate their local card scheme ‘Verve’, which is transacted through their POS terminal network, as well as run powerful loyalty programmes for their bank clients. 

Our multi-scheme loyalty platform, Realtime-XLS, enabled Interswitch to launch a card-based national loyalty programme with multichannel rewards and bank-wide campaigns. The outcome of this was Firstclub, a platform involving 15 banks and rewards from over 1000 merchants. 

What we did

Cielo is the largest payment cards processor in Brazil, the biggest payment systems company in Latin America by revenue and market value, and one of the top five processors worldwide.

When they first started working with us, their long-term goal was to deploy real-time loyalty services on a national scale in Brazil, for both card issuers and merchants.

Their main challenge was differentiating themselves from competitors so that they could sign up more merchants and keep them loyal to the Cielo brand.

Cielo also wanted to deploy real-time loyalty services on a large scale to reach issuers with dozens of millions of cardholders each, as well as serve millions of merchants in Brazil.

To help Cielo achieve their goals, we provided them with our highly scalable and powerful loyalty platform Realtime-XLS, so that they could empower merchants to deliver merchant-funded loyalty promotions to their customers, while including national card issuers’ loyalty programmes.

This same solution also enabled Cielo to launch their own card scheme with several large Brazilian issuers, bringing exclusive discounts and offers to their cardholders.

Thanks to the flexibility of Realtime-XLS, Cielo’s merchants are able to create their own promotions and have them run in real-time on their payment devices.

As the loyalty programmes brought increasing revenues to the merchants, Cielo was also able to use the platform to sign up new merchants.

They also managed to win back a famous Brazilian restaurant chain from a competitor.

What’s more, many well-established Brazilian retailers experienced large increases in transaction volumes and average purchase values when collaborating with Cielo. 

In 2018, Cielo was named World’s Most Innovative Company in Southern America, by Forbes Business Magazine.