Cardlytics is the company behind Bank of America‘s new cash-back program BankAmeriDeals, which rolled out across the country this summer, as well as many other banking rewards programs. Do customers like these programs? According to Cardlytics, they can’t get enough. The company reports a barely-there opt-out rate of 1.6%, and click-through rates for its offers clock in at 15 to 20%.
Bank Innovation spoke with Lynne Laube, President and COO of Cardlytics, about the recent deal with Bank of America and other projects on its slate. This deal was previously covered by Bank Innovation here and here. Senior VP of Product Management and Marketing Rod Witmond was also on the call.
Cardlytics, based in midtown Atlanta, works with more than 320 banks to present offers to customers based on transactional data. Its software is used not only by Bank of America, but PNC and Regions and other banks, and is a component of software offered by Intuit and Fiserv. Customers see Cardlytics offers when they access their bank accounts digitally, whether online, on mobile devices, or at the ATM. Offers are also pushed to customers through SMS and email. Customers click on the offers and they are loaded onto their cards or phones, ready to be redeemed at the participating merchant.
Laube explains that the advantage of offers appearing on customers’ banking software, as opposed to on sites like Facebook, is that customers are less likely to be thinking about spending money while they are on Facebook. (On Facebook they’re thinking about how boring their friends–and friends’ children–are.)
But if Cardlytics is using customer data to present offers, what is it doing with that data? Cardlytics does not see the data, nor do merchants, Laube says. The data is accessed only in aggregate, and personally identifiable data is not exposed by Cardlytics software.
Consider a $10 purchase at McDonald’s, with an offer for $1 off each $10 spent. The customer is charged $10 at the point of sale, and the dollar is debited back to him when he accesses his bank account. This is a potential source of confusion or frustration, as customers might wonder what happened to the offer when they pay full price at the time of purchase. But Laube says that only 1.6% of users opt out of Cardlytics programs and elect not to see offers.
Cardlytics earns an average fee of 10 to 15% from transactions with participating merchants. This fee is based in part on how well the offer performs. But as its name implies, Cardlytics offers highly measurable data to merchants, and the sheer size of its user base–75 million banking customers–is such that offers are guaranteed to “move the needle,” as Witmond put it.
Financial innovators across the industry are reporting big increases in mobile and online use, and Cardlytics is no exception. Witmond tells Bank innovation that 25% of Cardlytics’s mobile users check their bank accounts, and therefore potentially see Cardlytics offers, every day. The average online user of Cardlytics offers checks his account 9 times a month, while the average mobile user checks his account 20 times a month. These numbers, coupled with the solid opt-out and click-through rates Cardlytics is reporting, point to a lot of happiness for Cardlytics and its stakeholders.
Test-drive BankAmeriDeals for yourself here.