How Can Banks & Credit Unions Help Merchant Partners During Covid Recovery

(Digitizing Customer Interactions — Part II) (read Part I here)

By Batu Sat, Ph. D.
Founder + CEO, Mall IQ

In this article I’m going to explore a different part of the customers’ relationship with their banks & credit unions.

Like in the first part of this series, let’s start with stating the obvious in terms of the impacts of the pandemic. Physical retail has been impacted greatly either due to mandatory shut-downs or customers’ concern for being in enclosed spaces for a prolonged amounts of time.

The extend of the impact has varied depending on where you live in US or around the world. However one thing is certain is that customers are less likely to just browse through all the stores anymore.

The stats show that more and more customers do their search online and visiting only one or two stores selling the product they’re looking for before they make the purchase.

So, despite the amount of person-hours spent in organized retail (e.g. shopping malls or districts) has gone way down, the amount of purchases made is not that far off from before.

This observations leads to two things: (1) Problem and (2) Opportunity.

Problem is that a Retail store is visited by less number of people. On the other hand, people who visit the store are more likely to make a purchase than before.

So, if a store can be on the top 1–2 list among its competitors — let’s call this being a top-of-mind brand within a category — it has a better chance to increase sales.

Opportunity: Due to the limited availability of bank branches during the pandemic, more customers started using Mobile Banking Apps to do their banking and more. (you can read the first part of this series for details)

Mobile Banking Apps has grown its role beyond just banking and becoming a platform to promote your merchant partners.

This creates a win-win-win opportunity, where the Bank or the Credit Union can both inform their Customers about offers, promotions and new products that adds value to their shopping & payment experience, while increasing foot-traffic and sales at their Merchant Partners.

In the process Banks & Credit Unions earn interchange fees as well as the loyalty of their customers in terms of top-of-wallet status.

At Mall IQ we provide the tools and expertise to best utilize the merchant funded offers you may already have, figure out which brands and categories your customers naturally would respond to and most importantly how to deliver these offers that realize the win-win-win opportunity.

The key technology that allows the targeted delivery of such offers to the right set of customers at the opportune moment when they’re looking for that category of product is Mall IQ’s unique value proposition.

If you find this piece helpful or would like to suggest future topics that would be interesting, please reach out at via email or visit our website.