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Thierry Reginato, General Manager Loyalty programs initiatives are a must across the financial services industry, and players are now looking for innovation and differentiation. The availability of new digital channels has made it far easier to integrate loyalty programs into banks’ customer relationship management systems. Financial institutions can thus exploit their unique position as the payment facilitator between customers and businesses and offer real value to both parties. Today, a creative and intuitive reward system has the ability to launch any small or medium-sized business into the realm of loyalty marketing. Through a range of proven and innovative banking and payment based solutions, Welcome Real Time is helping organizations run real-time loyalty and marketing programs, leading to improved customer satisfaction, retention, and profitability.Welcome Real Time, a Collinson Group company, is a leading provider of innovative loyalty solutions for the financial services industry. According to Thierry Reginato, General Manager of Welcome Real Time, as the financial services market opens to new types of service providers, ultimately leading to fiercer competition for retail banks, the regulations on decreasing interchange, open-banking and revised payment service directives further augment the market challenges. The company’s unique knowledge of payment-based loyalty and real-time earn and burn at the point of sale combined with its understanding of best practices, delivers powerful insights into customer behavior. With Welcome Real Time’s solutions, clients understand more about their customers, resulting in better-informed decisions and more successful marketing campaigns.
Creating the Difference
Welcome Real Time brings differentiation to its clients through its way of using micro moments to bring value to the customers. By enabling real time engagement and rewards during micro moments such as the moment of payment, the customer experience is frictionless and genuinely innovative.
“We also offer go-to-market solutions that are easy to use and implement, enabling retail banks to quickly reach the desired productivity”
Welcome Real Time brings solutions that help retail banks offer more options for multi-channel earning and points redemption. In the meantime, banks are able to maintain the trust and confidence of their customers through relevant, targeted offers and communications.
Welcome Real Time has become a leading provider of innovative loyalty solutions for the financial services industry
The company disrupts the financial services market and differs from the competition by offering a suite of services including digitalization where they have reinvented the consumer purchasing experience, bringing loyalty into mobile devices and wearables. “We offer go-to-market solutions that are easy to use and implement, enabling retail banks to quickly reach the desired productivity,” adds Thierry Reginato. It is pertinent to mention that Welcome Real Time’s products are integrated within Collinson Group’s services—a firm specializing in shaping and influencing customer behavior—to drive revenue and create value for clients. Such strategy has shown potential by offering enhanced predictive analytics, card-linked offers, loyalty consulting, or agency services, developing Welcome Real Time’s capabilities to serve customers in a 360° manner.
Welcome Real Time addresses retail banks’ challenges with various value propositions including:
• cards and payment-based loyalty programs: boosting the usage of different payment methods by rewarding customers, which ultimately results in more issuing revenue
• bank-wide loyalty programs: increasing the overall profitability by rewarding various communication channels, products, and services that are most relevant to increase revenue and decrease costs.
• coalition loyalty programs: offering a loyalty program to collectively gain more insights on customers’ spending behavior and improve the services the customers need.
Welcome Real Time’s customer loyalty can be portrayed through its 10-year relationship with Alpha Bank—a leading banking group in Greece. Alpha Bank runs a successful loyalty program called “Bonus” with a coalition of key partners like AB Vassilopoulos, BP, Aegean Airlines, Vodafone and is associated with more than 4,000 stores. Over one million customers have been rewarded with points through promotional campaigns and more than 4.5 million redemption transactions were completed since 2006.
Building Customer Relationships
Thierry Reginato has been taking Welcome Real Time to new heights by closely following the constantly evolving financial arena—Open Banking/PSD2 and the new intermediaries enabled by APIs— which represent the biggest game-changers in payment services. As Reginato explains, the new payment initiation when combined with account information services can possibly create a new layer of user functionalities that may become the primary customer relationship holder for users. He adds that various products could add value to end-users in at least four ways: Tailor-made services will enhance the intermediation between users and their payment products helping them choose the most appropriate, cheapest, rewarding, and safest product etc., based on specific transactions and needs; personalization in choice of payment products by users could be subject to a rules-based functionality and can be extended to subscribing to new payment products or terminating old ones in the future; automation can trigger purchases if certain parameters are met, such as pricing, or offers; finally, intermediaries will be able to analyze transactions and present the data in a graphical format to users, then make suggestions for changes in purchase behavior, or suggest alternative suppliers of services.
Thierry Reginato believes in three core aspects: client focus, agility, and innovation. “In my past experiences, I have learned that to run a business you need to find the balance between strict processes and the degree of flexibility given to the management to foster creativity and agility,” he advises for all those budding entrepreneurs looking towards transforming their startups into becoming sought-after organizations.
The General Manager of Welcome Real Time also believes in gathering regular customer feedbacks about a solution or service to further enhance the business. Finally, “innovation is mandatory to remain a leader in any fast-changing industry; and innovation cannot be brought without closely following the evolution of any new market trend or disruptive technology,” he adds.
Today, Welcome Real Time provides financial organizations with viable solutions to reward engagement, deliver loyalty, and drive value from the customer relationship. Through its range of products and services, the company supports 23 million loyalty transactions every day, with more than 1 million retailers participating in Welcome Real Time’s client loyalty programs, and over 100 million end customers accessing rewards and offers through the client’s banks across the globe.
