With the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, there is an expectation among bank customers that they should receive instant deals and offers, says Parag Ladhawala, a senior business leader at Visa.
They're no longer daily, he says, they must be instant. The sheer mobile nature of human behavior, in which people use devices to which they didn't have access a decade ago, dictates a more real-time response from financial services firms.
Ladhawala was speaking on a panel at the annual Card Forum and Expo in Boca Raton, Fla. this week with Steve Kietz, an executive vice president and general manager at card-linked marketer edo Interactive. The panel was called The Future of the Deal.
"The expectation for relevance is higher than it's ever been," says Ladhawala. "So to achieve the higher relevance, there will have to be more control provided to customers that are going to be the recipients of these deals."
This could be in the form of text messages, emails or pushed alerts, he adds. But in order to get there, banks are going to have to pay closer attention to transaction data.
The challenge of analyzing big data in real time to mine clues that a customer might be open to a particular offer is heightened by the difficulty of measuring the success of deals, says Kietz. He says offers were once judged by a single metric: the response rate.
This may no longer be enough. "I think being able to have solid metrics that can translate into some measurable [return on investment] is where that is going to go," Ladhawala says.
There is of course room to measure consumer interest through social media, such as Facebook "likes," Kietz notes.
Banks, despite their lack of sophisticated customer analytics, still have a distinct advantage when it comes to deals and the redemption of those offers. Kietz says consumers would rather receive deals from banks than from any other source (Facebook, Twitter, daily deals companies and even edo).
Ladhawala adds that there is still room for banks to partner with such companies.
Regardless, banks are asking specific questions about their cardholders: "Where are you? Where are you going? And what are you going to do next?" Kietz says. They are looking to the likes of Visa and edo to figure that out, he says.
