Creating a Loyalty Program to Deepen Customer Relationships and Drive Cross-sell

The Challenge

Over the course of the past 40 years, Mashreq has been a pace-setter in Middle East banking—growing to its current position as the largest bank in UAE and leading the sector with progressive initiatives like mobile banking. In 2008, the bank conducted a study to identify new growth vectors and discovered it could generate US $400MM within five years by increasing its cross-sell ratio from 1.5 to 3.0. To help abet its ambition, we were engaged by Mashreq to create a single currency loyalty program that would cut across all products and services offered by the bank and unlock the commercial potential associated with cross-sell.

The Key Insight

Consumers tended to diversify among banks as a result of the structural barriers created by banks that eliminated incentives for consolidation. The loyalty program was defined around a central tenet of human loyalty: the greater the investment in a relationship, the greater the expected return. We transformed the business model behind bank customer loyalty, so that a customer adding a new Mashreq product would not only get attractive terms on the new product, but would immediately get improved the terms on all the products they already had. To help Mashreq establish the type of relationship that would compel Mass-Affluent consumers to join the bank, and then motivate them to buy multiple products, our team created a program that would break the walls between the bank’s divisions, while matching their requirement for share of wallet with an equally powerful share of heart.

The Outcome

We created a loyalty program called Salaam where everything a customer did with the bank made everything that came before it better. The program had two complimentary elements, Salaam Mosaic and Salaam Rewards. Salaam Rewards is a customized rewards program that provides customers with benefits based on their own tastes, interests and passions. Salaam Mosaic transformed the business model behind bank customer loyalty, so that a customer adding a new Mashreq product would not only get attractive terms on the new product, but would immediately get improved the terms on all the products they already had. All powered by a first-of-its-kind algorithm allowing the terms of any product the bank offers to be reset in real time on the branch floor, based on instantaneous calculation of lifetime customer profitability. Mosaic powered the bank to overshoot its revenue targets by 35% when Mosaic went live. Additionally, the program has shown the ability to attract Mass-Affluent consumers and to increase profitability per customer by between 33-45%.