Taking the Journey to the Next Level

We have a traveler named Kate.  Imagine Kate is at the airport and needs a quiet place to work before boarding.  She signed up to get notifications on her phone because of her Mastercard, so learns she has free access to the lounge in her terminal with Wi-Fi.  Now when Kate boards, she can sit back, relax and enjoy a movie.

This is the type of experience that we want to build into all of our products, to enrich the lives of our cardholders. Today, we’re excited to announce an expanded relationship with Flybits, a contextual intelligence company, to help us deliver ever richer and more personalized experiences.

According to a recent Mastercard-sponsored Harvard Business Review report, 90% of survey respondents say customers expect organizations to know their interests and anticipate their needs. This expectation—and the technology that enables it—is transforming our industry.

The consumer has a bank branch, a retailer and all of her friends in her pocket. She’s not coming to us.

We need to ensure we’re looking after her needs and delivering compelling choices through the entire end-to-end journey.

This means delivering the right message to the right person at the right time on the right device. Ultimately, the basics of marketing have been the same for decades, but the channels we have available to us and the opportunity to engage in a moment that is more relevant to the consumer are very different. For our customers—banks, retailers and others—this requires data-driven solutions that help consumers navigate their needs in a seamless way as well as an innovation service to help them deliver quickly. AR, VR, chatbots, robots and avatars are certainly not yesterday’s marketing tools!

Mastercard and Flybits share an understanding of how to use data in a consumer-centric way to deliver relevant experiences. With their mobile-based contextual marketing technology, we can take our loyalty and engagement services to the next level, creating real-time, seamless personal experiences for consumers that are also easy to implement for our customers.

Circling back to Kate our traveler, her journey doesn’t end when she boards her flight. In a perfect world, if it’s rainy when she lands, she’ll also get a notification with a taxi discount so she can get to her hotel without getting wet. This is the new age of contextual marketing. One where people get information at the right time and the right place.

You can read more about our relationship with Flybits from today’s press release.