MasterCard’s purchase of Truaxis, Inc., a Silicon Valley, Calif.-based provider of relevant credit and debit card-linked offers to consumers through merchants and financial institutions, provides the combination of daily deal offers with analytic capabilities that could be a game-changer in the daily deal business, according to Mark E. Johnson, president and CEO of Loyalty360.
Johnson agreed with press release announcing the deal that “the integration of the Truaxis platform with the MasterCard network will allow for real-time offer delivery coupled with advanced analytics to ensure consumers get more meaningful offers, merchants gain efficiencies in driving sales and financial institutions build greater loyalty with customers,” as long as the information is indeed truly integrated in order to take advantage of MasterCard’s behavioral data and data analytic capabilities.
“The daily deal programs are struggling to find traction,” Johnson said. “Consumers are inundated with daily deals from Groupon, Living Social and others. The big merchants are starting to move away from daily deals because they don’t just want discounting.”
The daily deals model fails merchants in large part because the consumer takes advantage of the deal, typically in a transaction that is discounted below the merchant’s own costs, and then doesn’t come in for additional business – which would provide the merchant with additional long-term profits, even after deducting the initial cost of the daily deal.
But MasterCard’s behavioral data and analytic capabilities would theoretically at least enable better targeting of the offers to prospects more likely to become long-term prospects. Additionally, the analytic capabilities can be used for better follow-ups with daily deal users, meaning a more comprehensive marketing campaign with daily deals as an initial customer engagement tool, Johnson said.
“The offer and rewards industry is rapidly evolving as consumers have demonstrated their desire for customized offers and savings that truly matter to their individual lifestyles,” said Tim Murphy, chief product officer, MasterCard, when the deal was announced. “By adding Truaxis’ expertise, its intellectual property and a talented team of software engineers to MasterCard, we increase our capabilities to offer merchants and financial institutions a solution that helps them better connect with consumers while evolving the model from the traditional coupon or daily deals offers programs that are popular today.”
According to the companies, this acquisition is a key component of the MasterCard strategy to deliver enhanced shopping experiences and added value to stakeholders through unique product innovations and partnerships with leaders in the offers and loyalty space.
Truaxis provides:
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An offers creation and campaign management platform that supports multiple offer types – enabling merchants to target offers to pre-selected consumer profiles.
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Advanced personalization capabilities to ensure consumers receive highly relevant offers.
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Flexible platform architecture, designed to provide simpler and faster implementations for financial institutions.
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Proprietary consumer engagement features, including social expense benchmarking and recurring bill analysis to create a richer consumer experience.
“Consumers have simply tuned out to irrelevant offers that reach them today through daily emails,” said Truaxis co-Founder and CEO Schwark Satyavolu, when the deal was announced. “Being part of the MasterCard family allows us to scale our technology platforms and continue to grow our issuer distribution pipeline globally to deliver highly personalized offers to consumers, through their preferred channels. Together, we will increase the affinity and success of loyalty programs for financial institutions and merchants while delivering more relevant offers to cardholders worldwide.”