UK Banks, FinTechs Team up to Bring Belated Tech Boost to Loyalty Industry

Loyalty programs and reward schemes are very popular in the U.K., with a recent PYMNTS report revealing that about 40% of the U.K.’s 67 million population belong to grocers’ loyalty programs, while 63% of U.K. shoppers use at least one grocer’s loyalty program.

Read the PYMNTS report: What U.K. Consumers Expect From Their Grocery Shopping Experiences

However, the abundance of these programs and schemes have left customers with the cumbersome task of having to juggle between multiple plastic loyalty cards and apps to claim their points and rewards.

U.K.-based loyalty program startup Bink is looking to remove that friction from the buyer experience and has partnered with banks to offer a digital solution that links a customer’s bank cards to their loyalty programs, making it easy for millions of bank customers to claim rewards.

Launched in 2015, the London-based loyalty app startup first signed a bank partnership with Barclays in 2019. It has recently inked a second deal with the U.K.’s largest high street lender, Lloyds, which acquired a minority stake in Bink as part of the deal.

Related: High Street Bank Lloyds Acquires Stake in FinTech Loyalty App Bink

“What the banks [Barclays and Lloyds] are trying to do is to provide value-added services to their consumers, and by embedding our technology directly into their mobile banking apps, we bring that frictionless value-added service to all of their customers,” Bink’s CEO Mike Jordan told PYMNTS in an interview.

Through this deal, users who shop with their payment cards are easily identified and automatically rewarded without the need for them to scan an additional loyalty card.

“There’s just no need to carry a loyalty card or even be given one in the first place, which is also great for new people joining a scheme in terms of environmental footprint — you don’t need to send people plastic cards anymore,” he explained.

Overdue Change in Loyalty Industry

According to Jordan, the collaborations are a great way to get new merchant retailers to join either existing loyalty or engagement schemes, or to create new ones and rapidly scale the membership, all while offering merchants high quality data from the banking partners.

“Data is a big component of the value that we bring to retailers,” he said. “What we then ensure is every single time that that consumer is paying, we are able to tell the retailer that the consumer has been there.”

See also: PYMNTS Report – ‘Making Loyalty Work For Small Businesses’

Prior to Bink, if a customer was pressed for time or left their card at home, merchants would not be able to access this personalized data on their shopping behaviors and would be left with a fragmented customer record.

With Bink’s technology solution, Payment Linked Loyalty, merchants now always get personalized shopping information, enabling them to leverage that “rich data” and service customers with better offers.

At a time when retailers are opening and trying to grow their businesses back after the pandemic, Jordan said the need for omnichannel is greater than ever, and helping retailers connect the dots between their online and physical businesses is key.

“We’re able to help them associate a transaction in a physical store to an individual — and if that individual also shops online, we can tie it all back together,” he noted.

Overall, Jordan said Bink’s technology solution that Bink offers in the loyalty space is long overdue and organizations that don’t keep pace with innovation will get left behind, especially as younger generations continue to expect seamless, frictionless processes in payments and other areas associated with it.

“What we’re bringing to the market is an overdue technological development,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense for consumers anymore, when payments are becoming so frictionless, that part of that payment process as it relates to loyalty is still so old fashioned.”

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