Finfare Connect
“We’ve saved costs & grown revenue using Bank Account Data from GoCardless instead of transactional transaction data sources.”
About
Payment-linked customer loyalty tech
Office locations
Payer locations
Key benefits
12,000+
customers have opted-in to link their payment data.
15%
increase in new business enquiries.
Data-driven customer loyalty
Finfare Connect’s customer loyalty platform provides major publishers with a one-stop solution for card-linked offers, affiliate offers and gift cards.
“It’s an end-to-end technology and content stack that handles all the heavy lifting of creating and managing a loyalty programme,” said Sam Leslie-Miller, VP of Customer Experience, Finfare Connect.
The recent addition of Bank Account Data from GoCardless to its offering means Finfare Connect can tap into purchasing data from opted-in consumers’ bank cards to drive intelligent rewards and offers. This open banking data means that, for example, it can tailor offers and rewards based on whether a customer is a new or returning one. “I think of it as your bank statement in an API,” said Sam.
The struggle with data access
Finfare Connect initially attempted to build this capability using data from the major card networks, but this quickly proved far too expensive and unwieldy for a start-up. The data was also incomplete. Instead, it needed a data source that was both cost-effective and simple to work with.
Getting access to transaction data through traditional methods can have huge minimum spend commitments and onerous testing requirements that are not great for start-ups.
“The transaction data is also limited to certain parameters and much of the data is not normalised. That means you’re relying on 3rd parties to maintain the data quality, which doesn’t always happen," said Sam.
That was unacceptable: poor data quality would drive support queries from consumers who felt they’d been short-changed on their rewards. “This would have the opposite impact on retention that our clients are looking for,” said Sam.
Faster time to market
Finfare Connect investigated several open banking data solutions but Bank Account Data from GoCardless stood out for the simplicity of its API, bank coverage and the scope of its data.
“The speed with which we could get up and running appealed to us, and so did the fact it's a continuous feed of raw and untokenised data that allows us to access two years of transaction history,” said Sam.
“Unlike others, the GoCardless APIs and documentation were so easy and self-explanatory that I could connect to them without any developer support, from either GoCardless or our team. And we can pull the data directly into our platforms and BI systems without relying on third-party dashboards or running exports.”
Cost savings and revenue opportunities
Finfare Connect’s payment data services were ready to go within a month, compared to the two years Sam spent on a similar project when working in a previous role. In a little over three months from launch, 12,000 consumers had opted-in to link their payment data with Finfare Connect’s loyalty programmes.
This has contributed to Finfare Connect scoring some stark – and stunning – business benefits as a result of adopting Bank Account Data from GoCardless.
“We’ve saved vast amounts of annual costs by opting for Bank Account Data from GoCardless instead of other sources,” said Sam.
Around 40% of consumers sign up to the service, which is almost double what I’ve experienced elsewhere, and our clients are benefiting from provable incremental sales growth. Success breeds success and inbound enquiries for our payment data services are up by about 15% every month.
Only just getting started
Finfare Connect plans to leverage the European-wide reach of Bank Account Data from GoCardless to extend its current offering, while also using it to drive innovations around advanced analytics.
“By tagging consumers’ payments data as, for example, ‘media’ or ‘entertainment,’ we are using predictive analytics to supercharge loyalty programs with insights into partnership or cross/up sell opportunities,” said Sam.
This speaks to open banking’s power to drive competition and innovation, according to Sam.
“As we’ve experienced at Finfare Connect, the open banking rails are more friendly to start-ups or small companies than other sources, so it really opens up competition,” he said.
Simply put: Bank Account Data from GoCardless has helped us innovate much more quickly and cost-effectively than we otherwise could have.
About Finfare Connect
Finfare Connect drives incrementality to data-driven loyalty platforms. With over 3,500+ merchants, 32 publishers, and 15,000,000 consumers using its services, it is a leading personalized offers platform in the UK, US, and Australia. It provides a one-stop solution for open banking, card-linked, affiliate offers, and gift cards.
Thanks to their modular, flexible, turn-key technology, they implement programs fast and cost-effectively using APIs or white-label rewards solutions, saving from spending time and money on developing a system in-house.
Finfare is entirely transforming the payment-linked offers space by creating full self-service white-label portals for advertisers and publishers. Their platform enables advertisers to reach many publishers via one portal, saving time and money when developing an in-house solution.
They are part of Finfare Inc., which provides modern expense management solutions to help small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) improve their financial health.
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