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Of the several companies offering merchant-funded rewards programs, only one has a name that's almost certain to grab consumers' attention: FreeMonee.
May 11
Can banks turn a single payment into a shopping spree? With mobile offers, edo Interactive says it's possible.
The Nashville company is announcing Tuesday that it is testing a service called Geocommerce, which analyzes the location data in consumer transaction information. As soon as a consumer makes a purchase, the Geocommerce service provides an offer for a merchant that is within walking distance of where the first payment took place.
The goal is to encourage the consumer to make another purchase right away. After buying a book, for example, a consumer could receive an offer at a nearby cafe where she can go to start reading.
"Geocommerce offers a new level of targeting," Steve Kietz, general manager and executive vice president of Strategic Partnerships at edo told American Banker in an interview on Monday.
Edo's location-based Geocommerce offers are designed to spur immediate purchases in part by having a limited shelf life: they typically expire within a few hours, according to Kietz.
This is a much faster expiration than edo's regular rewards system uses. Those offers last two to three weeks, and "few of them are right time, right place, right offer," Kietz says.
More than 130 financial institutions, including Fifth Third Bancorp (FITB) and Ally Financial, use edo's regular offer system.
Though edo's system has a mobile component — it can send alerts to a user's phone or email address — it uses the hard-wired payment system to target its offers.
"Right now it's based on the purchase, the card swipe," says Jeff Fagel, edo's vice president of marketing. Edo may also use a phone's GPS in a later version. "GPS is a capability as we look toward building out the platform," he says.
