First Data’s OfferWise: Linking Offers and Loyalty Programs to Credit Cards and Mobile Wallets

Merchants running deals with providers like Groupon and LivingSocial face many challenges, ranging from how to handle the traffic a daily deal will bring into their establishment, to ensuring profitability despite the steep discount being offered, to figuring out how to build long-term loyalty.

Thankfully, there are many tools, companies and solutions out there offering local businesses innovative approaches to the process of running deals.

First Data’s OfferWise is one such solution. It’s a platform that links offers, coupons and loyalty programs to credit cards or mobile wallets. OfferWise isn’t only convenient for customers redeeming offers, it’s a service that takes some of the burden of running a deal off of merchants and gives them better insights into how effective their offers are, among other things.

OfferWise, which now has more than 500,000 merchant locations enabled to leverage its service and more than 100 publishers using its platform, points to the following benefits for marketers and merchants who choose to use its solutions:

• Paperless, real-time redemption to improve the customer experience and reduce fraud
• Access to a network of innovative offer and loyalty publishers that have integrated to OfferWise
• Simple setup and integration
• Proven increase in offer redemption
• Improved targeting and ROI tracking
• Tokenization to secure sensitive customer information

A spokesperson from First Data shares more about OfferWise:

How would you explain First Data’s OfferWise solution to merchants and marketers?
The OfferWise solution is a u-commerce product that empowers consumers to “link” offers, coupons and loyalty programs to any payment card through a network of online publishers and application developers. When a linked card is presented at the point of sale (POS), the offer is processed and redeemed, alleviating the hassles of redemption tracking and paper for the consumer and merchant. OfferWise publishers and application developers help merchants improve customer acquisition and loyalty through unique consumer targeted offer programs. Merchants that leverage the technology can close the online-to-off-line loop through improved redemption performance and offer tracking/analytics.

Can you take us through a step-by-step process