“PAYBACK is multi-brand loyalty program with more than 50 online and offline and affiliate brand partners “- By, Mr. Rijish Raghavan, Vice President, PAYBACK India

How was the company conceptualized? What was the idea behind PAYBACK?

PAYBACK, the largest loyalty program in Europe entered the Indian market in 2010. Today it is India’s largest multi-brand loyalty program offering its members a multitude of benefits over traditional, stand-alone customer loyalty schemes. With over 50 in-stores and online partner brands, the program has a wide reach covering nearly 70% of everyday consumer spend categories ranging from groceries, travel, entertainment, apparel and more. PAYBACK enables consumers to collect and redeem loyalty points with a wide range of relevant partners across formats using a single card or even their mobile number on the move. The brand has received an overwhelming response in the country with over 60 million customers already associated with the platform and growing by the year.

How is PAYBACK trying to engage consumers differently by giving them more experiential rewards?

In India, loyalty transactions have been growing consistently over the past few years due to more real-time and personalized experience being delivered to the customers. In such a scenario, coalition loyalty can be a game-changer for consumer brands across India. It offers customers an opportunity to engage across a diverse portfolio of partner brands both in-store and online with options to earn and spend points and avail rewards. PAYBACK has an edge over any other traditional loyalty program being a multi-partner rewards program. The power of PAYBACK stems from pooling loyalty benefits from an extensive list of partners along with the competitive advantage of its differentiated offering: Using one single card, members earn loyalty points when they shop at a wide range of different merchants and brands – offline and online. The accumulated points via PAYBACK can be spent across its partner brands as well as the extensive rewards catalogue of PAYBACK. The product and services categories covered in the program account for nearly 70% of a member’s daily shopping requirements.

Moreover, loyalty programs aligned with social media and mobile commerce increasingly impact the brand experience and the stickiness of the consumer. With the advent of a large digital population and e-commerce industry, along with increased penetration of smartphones, PAYBACK is poised to grow at an exponential pace with new partner additions and new consumer acquisitions in the network. We believe in driving customer engagement through an integrated approach. Our constant engagement with customers ensures that customer retention is continued.

Presently, how many brands you have on your platform?

PAYBACK is multi-brand loyalty program with more than 50 online and offline and affiliate brand partners across a diverse kitty of categories. Brands range from fuel leader HPCL; to banking partners ICICI Bank& American Express; daily needs partner Big Bazaar’ travel portals; MakeMyTrip and Tripadvisor; apparel brands, Central, FBB, Brand Factory; entertainment portal, Bookmyshow; online portals, eBay, Voylla, Naaptol, electronics and home décor brands,eZone& Hometown & affiliate partners like Amazon, Flipkart just to name a few. The network is growing at an extremely fast pace.

Who would primarily be your consumer audience?

We have wide audience owing to the large scale of our network covering every essential service category in a consumer’s daily life. Our focus, however, is to drive consumers who are avid shoppers and digital natives to engage on the network.

How do you look at the competition?

We are currently one of the industry leaders in the coalition loyalty space in India. With over 50 in-stores and online partner brands, PAYBACK has been the only successful brand in India to build a diverse partner portfolio and over 60 million members already associated with the platform. We continue to benchmark ourselves against our own potential and targets. We need to invest in our capabilities to ensure we keep pace with the changing demographic, technology and evolving needs of our customer base.

 Any expansion plans?

Our focus will be mainly on enhancing value to our existing partners and customers, strengthening the partner base across various categories for a better user experience, which will result in adding more users to the PAYBACK Program. We are focusing on ubiquity to give our customers more choice among various verticals, through our strategic approach of acquiring new partners which bring relevance and further strengthen our coalition.

We have made several technological investments in past and we are still strengthening our platform capabilities to keep pace with changing demographics and evolving customer need. We are making our platform more user-friendly and offer shoppers the ease to maximize the full potential of the program. Our web portal, mobile app, mobile identifier and digital enrolment initiative is a step towards enhancing consumer shopping experience.