Loyalty schemes are an integral part of the marketing strategies of many businesses, and
enable organizations to drive incremental revenue, improve the ROI of marketing activities
and collect actionable customer data. The U.K. is a large and mature market for loyalty
schemes worth £150m per annum and growing at ~3.5% pa, with the majority of large
retailers expected to operate a scheme by 2013. Loyalty schemes operate in multiple ways,
with consumer activity tracked online, with vouchers or tokens, or via a card-based
mechanisms including credit, debit, magnetic-stripe ‘smart’ card and increasingly, prepaid
cards. Loyalty schemes based on prepaid card technologies are set to dramatically impact the
loyalty market in the next 5 years.
This project will develop a flexible platform to deliver multiple loyalty schemes. The project
will introduce new and innovative features to the loyalty scheme market by facilitating the
interaction of individual schemes hosted on the platform, and by allowing an unprecedented
degree of flexibility around loyalty value accrual and redemption. The platform will deliver
significant benefits to retailers by delivering the ability to drive loyalty through changing the
time, location, value of offers “very flexibly” – and the ability this gives retailers to manage
stock levels across peak / off-peak demand in an offline (retail) and online environment. The
platform will disrupt the loyalty programme management market by deploying new
technologies to enable organizations to lower the total cost of ownership of their loyalty
scheme, delivering enhanced functionality to the market, and by allowing a broader range of
organizations to implement loyalty schemes through reducing scheme implementation costs.