Touch and go: staying relevant in the mobile revolution
To say the payments landscape has undergone a transformation is an understatement. The transition from cash to card payments is well documented, but an equally seismic shift is underway as payments migrate to mobile and digital wallets, with integrated payment mechanisms at its heart.
Touch and go: staying relevant in the mobile revolution
Digitisation of payments has important implications for businesses and their core propositions. Today they must work even harder to ensure they are offering customers seamless, integrated services for the connected age.
Mobile revolution
Payments innovation has been led by a number of technological factors, but few rival smartphones in terms of their proliferation and penetration into our daily lives. With this, more people than ever are using their mobile phones to access the internet. A report by the Boston Consulting Group predicts the number of people accessing internet through mobile will increase from 1.9 billion in 2015 to 3 billion by 2020, covering a staggering 65 percent of the world’s adult population.
Consumers across the globe are therefore turning to their increasingly sophisticated mobile phones to carry out a wide range of transactions. This is true across all age groups, but more so Millennials, the digital natives, and Generation Y-ers. As the first adopters of mobile technologies, they have come to expect to use their phones to do everything, including accessing loyalty schemes and offers.
At American Express we’re especially focused on Millennials, an important customer segment. We’re aware that Millennials expect to be rewarded for their loyalty but that their loyalty can be short term unless you stay useful and relevant.
And today a key part of ensuring that relevance is about being where our Cardmembers are. We’re
actively using mobile technology to deliver new ways to leverage our assets to make loyalty work for our customers and the next generation of customers.
We’re delivering convenient relevant offers to Cardmembers through our Amex Offers programme in the U.K, levering our insights on customer behaviour to help ensure our retail partners know their customer and helping them to deliver a customer journey which builds loyalty.
In summary
The rise of smartphones has changed both the payments landscape and customer expectations.
Savvy businesses will treat this as an opportunity to pair up with retailers to offer their customers integrated services by enabling them to access offers in real time as part of an ongoing interaction between the brand and the customer. This is a winning combination for all – not only does foster better relationships with consumers, but it also helps build closer links between merchants and retailers.
To succeed, businesses must also understand that integration is about being where their customers are - understanding where they are spending their time and then investing in the tools to enable them to be in the right place, at the right time.
For more information on Amex Offers click here.
Dan Edelman, VP Marketing, American Express
Email: ukmarketing@aexp.com
Twitter: @AmexUK
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The American Express Company, also known as Amex, is an American multinational financial services corporation headquartered in Three World Financial Center in New...
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