New Clean Way to Pay: Mobile Wallets Surge on Covid 19 Fears
Requiring no physical contact with merchant point-of-sale terminals, mobile wallets are increasingly viewed as a safer way to pay by consumers around the world. Fears that payment cards, cash and coins may be tainted with the coronavirus, and that touching in-store terminals might make shoppers sick, the use of mobile wallets is getting a boost. According to a Forbes article, central banks in the US, China and South Korea earlier this year took the drastic step of cleaning/quarantining cash bank notes to disinfect them.
CardLinx Insight
In the US, consumers have become wary of having to sign for credit-card transactions and touching point-of-sale devices used by prior shoppers. That’s driving a shift toward in-store use of digital wallets and contactless payments.
Behavior is changing in other important ways. Many are doing more shopping online due to fear of exposure, and stay-at-home orders. Mobile wallets are getting uptick from this trend too: As e-commerce increases share, mobile device payment apps are gaining traction online.
The good news for payment card issuers: Credit and debit cards are primary funding sources for mobile wallets. An increase in mobile wallet usage is not necessarily a negative for banks and payment networks.
Here’s a summary of the top 10 mobile wallets.
Card-Linked Loyalty Points May Save Airlines
According to recent news reports, US airlines are negotiating with major card-issuers to have the banks pre-buy miles. Most airlines have been hit hard by Covid-19, grounding as many as 70% of flights—and putting the industry in desperate need of cash. Card-issuers would buy airline loyalty points and link them to card spending as an incentive to drive card use. The proposed deal would see card-issuers pre-purchase large volumes of points at discounted prices.
CardLinx Insight:
Should deals between card issuers and airlines go through, expect to see an increased number of innovative card-linked offers tied to airline miles. Banks have seen a decrease in card spending and are likely to use lucrative airline loyalty miles to reverse the trend, including making card-linked offers that tie loyalty mile-earning to e-commerce.
Cash Back Offers Pivot to E-Commerce
Apple Card announced on Friday that its 3% cash-back card-linked offers at Walgreens would also be valid for drive-thru purchases and on purchases made through the drug retailer’s e-commerce site. Because of Covid-19, merchants are seeing a significant shift in sales to online, and away from in-store.
CardLinx Insight:
Covid-19 has upended many business models—including those related to card-linked offers. Historically, CLO has been used to drive in-store sales. But with many brick-and-mortar stores shuttered around the world, card-issuers and CLO publishers are pivoting to drive delivery, pick-up, drive-thru and online purchases. AppleCard/Walgreens is just one example: Numerous others including CardLinx members Harvey Nichols and 24S LVMH have taken similar steps, using card-linking to drive e-commerce sales. Long after Covid-19 is gone, merchants will increasingly leverage CLO to drive omni-channel sales.
AUGEO ACQUIRES EMPYR AND LAUNCHES FIGG – TWO LEADING CARDLINX MEMBERS JOIN FORCES
Augeo announced today that it will acquire fellow CardLinx member Empyr. The deal terms were not disclosed. Augeo is a leading digital engagement company and card-linked technology provider to banks. Empyr powers the Yelp card-linked offer program, among other leading publisher platforms. The new company will be called Figg and will have more than 60 million linked cards and $300 billion in transaction volume.
CardLinx Insight:
The deal had been some time in the making and signals CLOs coming of age as a key digital engagement technology. The new company will be a powerhouse in card-linking. CLO is no longer just a platform for new customer acquisition. The technology is now ubiquitous on apps as varied as online banking, ride-sharing, e-commerce couponing and travel. These apps use CLO to drive repeat visits by consumers by luring them with the opportunity to save or be rewarded with loyalty points.
TransUnion Insights on the Path to Economic Recovery
INSIGHTS ON THE IMPACTS OF RECORD UNEMPLOYMENT ON THE ECONOMY, SPENDING AND CREDIT CARD BUSINESS
TransUnion Senior Vice President, Paul Siegfried, discusses the path to economic recovery.
CardLinx members include the largest and most innovative companies in fin-tech, payments, retailing, ecommerce and mobile wallets. Members include Microsoft, Samsung, Rakuten, UBS, RBC, Mastercard, Discover, FIS, LVMH-24S, Hilton, Fidel, Augeo and many more in 17 countries and 4 continents.
We are bringing their insights from around the world straight to you in an informative new podcast called Fin-Tech Friday. The podcast features insights, interviews and the latest news from CardLinx members around the world. Stay connected and subscribe to CardLinx Fin-Tech Friday.
MEMBER UPDATES
New Member: Bank of America
We welcome Bank of America to the CardLinx Association!
Member Spotlight
Headquarters: Seattle, WA
Founded: 2019
Company Category: Advanced Technology for Loyalty, Rewards and Offers
Industry: Marketing Technology
HOW DOES YOUR COMPANY FIT INTO THE CARD-LINKING OR ONLINE-TO-OFFLINE COMMERCE ECOSYSTEMS?
ContextLink offers a new category of Personalized AI and Data Platforms that allows customizable content to your loyalty program – providing both insight and engagement into a much more highly-complex consumer. We do this through our proprietary platform that micro-segments customer data to find the known and unknown and delivers it through the DSP’s of choice.
WHO ARE YOU TRYING TO REACH?
Organizations that are trying to execute personalized, inference-driven marketing using the massive trail that consumers leave across their brand’s loyalty experiences, rewards and offers.
HOW WILL YOUR COMPANY APPROACH ONLINE-TO-OFFLINE COMMERCE THAT IS NEW OR DIFFERENT?
ContextLink looks at all aspects of your customer (and their data) and can infer the specific intent of those users leveraging our proprietary technology, which we call Micro-Segmentation. While most companies are just segmenting we take it a layer deeper to discover the nodes and edges that drives personalized surveys, offers, and rewards in their loyalty programs – all at the Point of Sale.
WHAT ARE SOME INSIGHTS OR CHALLENGES IN IMPLEMENTING OF YOUR SOLUTION?
Contextlink uncovers aspects of your customer’s journey that you never knew existed. As a result, brands can evaluate the efficiency of their programs in detail and make informed decisions about where to spend each dollar. Some of the challenges of our offering is clients (brands) have a lot of legacy system and don’t have the tools to leverage this advancement. That is why we offer from data ingestion to segmentation distribution. We wanted to make it easy for our clients to say “yes” and see value right away.
WHAT ARE SOME NEW PROJECTS FOR THIS YEAR?
We are looking to bring in more Consumer Engagement tools so our clients can personalize content when/where their customer are; inside loyalty apps, rebate apps, etc.
HOW WILL THE ONLINE-TO-OFFLINE COMMERCE INDUSTRY DEVELOP OVER THE NEXT FIVE YEARS?
We believe that the loyalty online-to-offline commerce, will be going through a revolution. Right now, the economy stands on solid group where prospecting has been easy and customer engagement has taken a back seat. However, with a recession in the front, we believe, the focus will shift to the customer engagement (loyalty/rewards) where the advancements in technology, data aggregation, enrichment, and personalization will take the front seat. That being said, we will see a new way of engaging the offline and online customer commerce and leveraging each piece to hit the customers where/when they are.
UPCOMING CARDLINX CONFERENCES
CARDLINX EUROPE
PERSONALIZED MOBILE COMMERCE – IN STORE COMMERCE IN EUROPE
June 30, 2020 | Paris, France
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CARDLINX ASIA
THE AGE OF MOBILE WALLETS & MOBILE OFFERS
September 1, 2020 | Tokyo, Japan
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CARDLINX WEST
DATA & MOBILE OFFERS – THE NEXT PHASE OF COMMERCE
October 7, 2020 | San Francisco, CA
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NEW DIGITAL SERVICES
CardLinx Commerce Tracker
The CardLinx Association brings to you an interactive world map that follows the top 20 national economies of the world. Track the latest Covid 19 commerce activity restrictions and reopenings in the largest economies across the globe.
CardLinx Webinar Series
Each month, The CardLinx Association hosts a live, interactive webinar with speakers from some of the biggest companies in the world on the most important and relevant topics for your business. Topics include impacts of COVID19 on the industry in terms of consumer credit behavior, mobile wallets, card companies and lenders. The webinars are complimentary for all CardLinx members. Non-members must pay a registration fee of $149. Register today as space for each webinar is limited!
Please contact rebecca@cardlinx.org with questions or if you need additional information.
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