Is the Tipping Point Nearing? EMV Enabling Loyalty Benefits at Last in the US?
Those are just some of the reasons that EMV compliance may be closer on the horizon for US financial services providers than previously predicted by analysts and industry experts.
But the announcement by a third US credit union that they intend to adopt the EMV standards before they are mandated in the US have the team at COLLOQUY excited for an entirely different reason. The latest EMV entrant in the US is the North Carolina State Employees' Credit Union. Starting next month, they will migrate their 1.7 million debit cards from a traditional magnetic-stripe design to the chip-based EMV design that much of Europe, Latin America and Asia Pacific have been adopting.
So why would the loyalty marketing team at COLLOQUY care about this development? That part is simple - it is all about a better loyalty "device". Since the beginning of loyalty marketing, it has been necessary to have some sort of device to identify customers and seamlessly track their behavior. But, the promise of EMV-based cards for the loyalty marketing industry is that we can have a smart device that enables soft benefits and surprise-and-delight elements for credit card and debit card users. Those might include anything from the ability for the EMV chip card to store our personal preferences so that they are instantly recognized and rewarded when we check out at our favorite retailer. It could also include relevance-related data points to ensure that the messaging we receive by store associates or on our retail receipts aren't just mass-targeted offers.
The ability to augment the ability of the legacy-based POS network in the US to provide customization and relevance is an opportunity worth dreaming about. And believe us - we at COLLOQUY have dreamed about this for the last 10 years or so. That is why these small, early adopters among the financial services institutions in the US have us cheering.
Now - many of you will argue that smart phone technology has already leap-frogged the capabilities of a chip-based credit or debit card. You may be right about that.
