New features such as merchant-funded rewards on the home page of Intuit Inc.’s FinanceWorks personal financial management system for online banking are particularly intriguing, analysts say.
“By bundling merchant-funded rewards into the online banking offering, … there is a huge opportunity for the financial institutions,” says Ron Shevlin, a senior analyst at Aite Group LLC in Boston.
Intuit announced the changes to the system, launched in 2008, last week.
Cardlytics Inc. of Norcross, Ga., will power the back-end merchant-funded rewards program for participating banks and credit unions. Intuit says it will link consumers’ debit card purchases from various merchants with competing deals or money-saving opportunities. Consumers may redeem the offers for cash that will be deposited into customers’ accounts when customers swipe their cards.
“The targeted piece is a merchant-funded reward, but there is no e-mail or coupon or printout or code,” says Albert Ko, senior vice president of consumer solutions for Intuit Financial Services. “All [they] do is click to activate the offer, … swipe the card, and the amount is credited back to their account.”
Beneficial Mutual Bancorp Inc. of Philadelphia has offered FinanceWorks for more than a year and is using the merchant-rewards piece to encourage its check card users to switch from PIN-based transactions to signature based, according to Denise Kassekert, executive vice president of relationship banking for the $4.7 billion-asset company.
Cardlytics can support rewards on all payment types, but Beneficial is using it only for signature transactions, which bring it more transaction revenue. “The revenue stream is important to us,” Kassekert says.
Intuit’s financial institutions business is the former Digital Insight Corp., which it bought in 2007. The companies had been working on the design of FinanceWorks before the acquisition.
Through its more than 1,500 financial-institution clients, Intuit says it has relationships with more than 10 million banking customers. About 3 million use the new home page, which Intuit said it has been testing for about a year.
“The new online-banking experience transforms the way consumers interact with banks or credit unions, and it helps financial institutions increase customer engagement,” Ko says.
What do you think about this? Send us your feedback.
