DCA Commerce Code

This week on Commerce Code, we speak with Kelli Hobbs, VP, Head of US Business Development at Valuedynamx, and Paras Joshi, Strategy & Development Officer at Valuedynamx. Valuedynamx is a leading global provider of purchase rewards, and they are a part of Collinson, which provides a leading global travel ecosystem.

We are talking about:

• Challenges in the increasingly competitive loyalty space
• Ways to maintain or enhance engagement among loyalty program members
• How to increase value to consumers and merchants by making program points redeemable where consumers most want to redeem them

This week on Commerce Code, we speak with Avery Miller from RBC and Shawn Conahan from Wildfire Systems about the evolution of FI loyalty and rewards programs. Avery is VP of Avion Rewards Shopping and Digital Product at RBC. RBC is one of the world's leading FIs, headquartered in Toronto; they serve 17 million clients in Canada, the U.S. and 27 other countries. Shawn is the Chief Revenue Officer at Wildfire Systems, which provides white-label shopping rewards and cashback platforms to leading companies like Microsoft, Visa, Citi - and of course RBC.

We are talking about:

• The challenges FI loyalty programs face
• How consumers experience FI loyalty programs - and how their preferences are driving change
• RBC's response to those challenges and changing preferences
• What's next for the sector as the evolution continues

Additional Resources:

• Harvard Business Review: Are You Undervaluing Your Customers?
• BCG/Wildfire Whitepaper: Loyalty 2.0 - Making Loyalty Pay
• Wildfire Article: Banking on Shopping Rewards: Why Financial Institutions are Prioritizing These Rewards Programs

This week on Commerce Code we speak with Surge Berg, Alexis Wiktorski and Jeff Zilberman of BN, an Augeo Company. BN uses AI to help brands enable employees and customers to be effective brand advocates. Their tools make it easy for brand advocates to create social media content, and they make it easy for companies to manage the risks that come along with social media brand advocacy. Today we're talking about:

• What's new in 2024
• The total brand advocacy opportunity - what can grassroots social media do for companies?
• Brand advocacy horror stories
• And finally - how companies can get their brand advocacy strategy started.

This week on Commerce Code, Dan is coming back from a conference on Web3 at the University of Chicago - he was there to interview Ryne Miller, the former General Counsel of FTX U.S. They had a fascinating conversation and Dan is reflecting on some of his takeaways from the conference overall:

• Scandals and whether they have anything to do with Web3 or innovation
• Risk and innovation - and different kinds of risk
• Global markets and innovation

Stay tuned as we creep up and look over the precipice of the volcano at the risks and possibilities of Web3 and cryptocurrencies.

This week on Commerce Code we speak with Avinash Chukka, Vice President of Product at Cardlytics. Avinash spoke at the DCA Summit at Mastercard this November, so we are following up on that session to unpack some of his key points. We'll be talking about art vs. science in digital marketing, tactics to increase cardholder engagement through targeted offers, the marginal benefits of shaping cardholder spend by having better data on preferences, geo-fenced offers and more.

This week on Commerce Code we speak with Debby Lee, Senior Director of Partnerships at Cartera, A Rakuten Company. As a division of Rakuten, Cartera is the largest source of Shop & Earn offers in the U.S. and Canada. And as we found out in the interview, Rakuten means “optimism” in Japanese. Indeed it’s an optimistic episode this week as we’re talking about the consumer in 2024 and holiday shopping as we round out 2023. We hit:

• Changes in consumer behavior - “the great trade-down” to more affordable brands
• Persistent spending among affluent consumers
• How this impacts loyalty program planning and execution in the coming year, and finally
• a look at how Black Friday and Cyber Monday performed and what that may mean for the rest of holiday shopping this year.

This week on Commerce Code we speak with Jeff Mankoff, Founder & CEO of vPromos. We're talking about current challenges with the CLO ecosystem and business models, as well as process and technology simplification as a potential disruptor in CLO and fintech more broadly.

This week on Commerce Code we speak with Jeremy Frick, Amy Mullins and Natali Ryzhikova from BN, an Augeo Company. We're talking AI, humans, paid media and organic media.

Brand Networks describes itself as pioneers in AI-driven social technologies that revolutionize global audience engagement—empowering organizations to deliver unrivaled brand experiences through authentic, scalable solutions that define the social landscape through technology innovation.

We’re going to unpack that in the interview -

• What does that mean in practice?
• What’s the role for human expertise?
• Where does AI fit in?
• How does AI do things humans couldn’t do themselves?
• Where is it headed in the next few years?

• What the retail and payments spaces look like in Germany - how that's different from other markets like the UK and USA - and what that means for loyalty
• Some of the challenges of different data rules and places where there are opportunities to build out better rewards and offers by being smarter about how to use data