What is Payback Rewards Program?

• 27 July 2019 | 1747 Views | By Mint2Save

The idea of rewards and bonuses has always worked for businesses. From keeping the customers loyal to attracting new ones, the idea of reward hasn’t spared any field, be it the airlines or groceries. While having an in-house rewards and bonuses can be a daunting task for corporations, collaboration, shall not only fetch them better management services, but also serve well to their customers.
One appreciable effort in creating a common rewards program, irrespective of the fact from where one shops or subscribes services, is Payback. Known globally, and rated among the highest for its customer satisfaction, this subsidiary of American Express has been gaining new customers and tying up with new companies on a regular basis. In this article, we shall explore more about Payback, along with some basics of a rewards program.

But first, let us understand what is a Rewards program?

Technically reward programs are a way of marketing products and increasing loyalty of consumers among the brand. Understand it this way, Amazon Prime is a loyalty program whereby paying some amount of money you do all your online purchases from Amazon in the assurance of faster deliveries and other benefits.

But not all loyalty or reward programs are the same. Not every program asks you to pay some kind of amount to get a privileged membership, every reward program has a different structure and the different criteria to earn points and redeem them.

What about the Payback Rewards program?

To understand the Payback rewards program lets go a few years back, in 2010 when Payback entered the Indian market acquiring a controlling stake in India’s one of the best reward programs i-mint. Now, 9 years later, it has become India’s largest multi-brand loyalty program having more than 100 million members and counting.

Payback started originally in Germany in 2000, where within one month of its launch the program amassed more than one million members! The genius behind this awesome product is Alexander Rittweger, who, while working for Lufthansa for their Miles & More program, thought of creating a rewards program for everyone.

Nine years later in 2009, Payback made its first foray outside their home country, extending its membership program to the citizens of Poland, Payback registered great success in Poland as well, with more than six million people enrolling into their rewards program six months within the launch!

Payback’s India operations is also a similar example of their success story being repeated, with more than 100 million members and growing, out of which it engages with 8 million members every day. To understand how big Payback is in India, Get this, a new customer enrols in their program every 3 seconds!!

Why is Payback rewards so famous in India?

In India, where there is a cutthroat competition among brands, everyone vying for the end consumer’s loyalty, each company created their own loyalty programs, often with confusing terms and conditions and always favouring the company and not the customer.

Payback turned the whole model upside down, instead of a consumer enrolling into different loyalty program of different companies, managing different cards, different points, Payback focused on creating just one loyalty program, where is the membership number is your mobile number. No need to memorize complex membership numbers or carrying your card everywhere, just tell your mobile number and you’re up and running!

If you’re thinking of where Payback gets accepted? Then, get to know this, Payback is present in more than 100 cities accepted across more than 12,000 payment terminals.

Payback has been widely accepted among consumers in India, but what about businesses who create their own loyalty programs? Well, Payback gives them the opportunity to integrate their loyalty program into payback, which means that the business will get access to Millions of consumers from the start just by integrating them in Payback, they will also incur savings in cost as they don’t have to manage a separate loyalty program – payback will do it for them and guess what will be your membership number in Payback? Your own mobile number!

The Payback Model

So you would be wondering how does payback actually work, I mean what is its earning model? How does it stay profitable? What are its revenue sources? Well, lets get a deeper understanding then, Payback terms all its companies as its “Partners”, With more than 100 partners in Offline as well as Online space, which include American Express, ICICI Bank, Brand Factory, BigBazaar, Hindustan Petroleum, Flipkart, Vodafone,  Amazon, Myntra and the list goes on and on. Here are some of the known way through which Payback mints money:

Partner Fees:

Whenever every partner comes on board it has to pay a fee to Join Payback, as well as a fee on an annual basis, which is based on the number of customers that engage with Payback through their sales channel. This is a constant source of money for payback.

Redemption Fee:

Though enrolling into Payback and earning points is totally free of cost, it is at the redemption where Payback charges money on Customers. Let’s take a scenario, suppose you have an ICICI Credit Card, the more you play through it, the more payback reward points you earn. Now when you redeem those points on any purchase, Payback charges you ₹ 250 minimum even if it’s a small purchase. So every purchase using payback points earns them money.

Selling your Data:

This is a controversial point, although Payback never confirms that it sells your data, but there is a high possibility that it does. Think about it, in your every purchase you give your payback number, so payback does have a history of transactions you have done, based on which it can create a Unique profile, according to your age, gender, mobile number, location and combining it with the purchase history makes this data a whole lot important for the companies which are dying to increase their sales anyhow! Selling it or sharing this data with it Partners on a cost would be a  great source of revenue for it!

Products it sells:

Not just a loyalty program, Payback also promotes its partner’s products on its website, through e-mailers and gives out “exclusive” deals to its members. On every sale which is made via Payback referral, the seller pays certain commission to the company (like paid advertisements).

All the above ways make Payback a great revenue generating company and in turn making it a win-win situation for both the company and its customers.

All this information makes you more curious and you cannot wait to Join the program then head over to Payback website enrol there and keep earning on your spending!