Partnership Marketing: Influencing Spend And Creating Loyalty

How do you create a targeted offerings system that appeals to merchants, issuers and consumers alike? TSYS has the answer: through it’s new Partnership Marketing solution.

PYMNTS.com spoke with Paul Bridgewater, Group Executive, Global Product at TSYS, to discuss Partnership Marketing’s development, the symbiotic relationship it fosters between those in the payments ecosystem and the fundamentals behind its targeted offering system.

“[Partnership Marketing] is an offer repository that enables merchants or retailers to create offers that are then selectively deployed or displayed or pushed out to card holders via a number of different distribution channels,” Bridgewater explained.

Some of those channels include: online banking, credit card and statement systems, mobile applications, white space within paper statements, e-mail and more. As Bridgewater points out, the different channels “provide relevant offers based upon spend plans, as well as historic purchases, that are matched from the offer repository.”

According to Bridgewater, Partnership Marketing is designed not to beneficial to only one segment of the payments ecosystem, but rather to merchants, issuers and consumers alike.

Merchants benefit because it allows them to create offers and awards, and “incentives that are are directly implemented to cardholders in a near real-time basis,” Bridgewater notes. Partnership Marketing is also a pay-per-performance solution, meaning there’s no up-front cost for merchants. Factor in Partnership Marketing’s ability to demonstrate to merchants what distribution will look like, and the appeal is obvious.

“It really is a tool that takes their marketing efforts, and their marketing solution, to another level of predictability,” Bridgewater said.

As for issuers, Partnership Marketing is valuable, in Bridgewater’s estimation, because of its ability to influence spend.

“Well, the real benefit [for issuers] comes in driving more spend on their plastic, as well as really creating a better and more valuable engagement model between them and their cardholders,” he said. “They’re creating additional value over and above what they provide today to their card holders, by enabling incentives and offers and rewards to be positioned directly to their card holders. What we’re seeing is a top-of-wallet opportunity, so everyday spend starts to shift to that particular issuer’s plastic.”

And finally, the last cog in TSYS’s Partnership Marketing machine is the consumer. According to Bridgewater, the reason consumers benefit from the solution is simple: they receive more relevant offers.

“So from a consumer’s perspective, it really comes down to receiving offers that are valid, and offers that are applicable to me based upon my spend,” he said. “It’s just really that next generation of targeted offering over and above the tried and tested versions of those like Groupon and Living Social, which is more of a kind of mass-scatter kind of approach,” he said.

To hear more Bridgewater on Partnership Marketing, TSYS’ payments innovation and more, listen to the full podcast below.

   

To read a transcript of the audio conversation, click here.



Paul Bridgewater

Group Executive – Global Product, TSYS

Paul Bridgewater is group executive of global product for TSYS. He is a 23-year veteran of the payments and financial services industry, having previously served as senior vice president, payments, of Digital River, Inc., in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, where he managed all aspects of its multi-million dollar internal payment services business unit. Bridgewater’s additional responsibilities at Digital River included product management and roadmap execution, third-party payment vendor relationships, payment services strategy, and real-time fraud and risk mitigation for its external payment services business. He also has extensive international payments experience, having worked with Citibank International, NatWest Bank, PLC and Anker Data Systems.