It's the Great Singapore Sale again, and there has never been a better time to enjoy credit card promotions. Every bank seems determined to out-do each other in bigger discounts and better deals for cardholders in their tie-ups with merchants.
Card marketing has never seen tougher times of competition. Aside from the stiff competition in funding and delivering all kinds of expensive-to-run promotions (consumers have even come up with a ever-so-helpful listing of all the great credit card deals this year), customer loyalty seems to be a thing of the past as more and
How many credit cards do you carry with you? 4? 5? 10?
It is a sad, sad state of things to see a credit card reduced to a retail discount card.
In March 2011, OCBC Cards managed to complete the most large-scale loyalty platform implementation in recent memory. I was glad to be part of the project team to have made it happen.
In the time I have spent in customer loyalty, the primary focus had been on a few key elements, namely, the value of the reward currency, the relevance of the rewards earned, and the rate at which they are earned.
Back then, no one had anticipated the proliferation of social networking and the widespread use of the smart phone as a banking medium.
As these developments unfold in ever-increasing frequency and speed, it dawned on me, that a customer's view on rewards would also have altered by these changes. This is an epiphany that led me to think that the next battle ground in rewards is not in the 'earn', but the 'burn'.
While the rest of the card banking community tries to out-do each other in multiplier points earn, perhaps enabling a quick and easy way for customers to access their rewards currency anytime, anywhere, is the next big thing to disrupt the market?
I hope anyone who reads this will take a moment to visit the OCBC rewards mobile website: mobile.ocbc.com.
Although this is a mobile web-based service at the moment, I hope that in time, our recently released Android mobile banking app will incorporate rewards as a key functionality.
Meanwhile, have a look a a video on the much-talked about OCBC Android mobile banking app.
ZDNet interview of mobile banking product manager.
