Barclays: People Powered Payment Card Leverages Travel Perks Community

Barclaycard has launched its second crowdsourced initiative, Barclaycard Travel, an extension of the community created by Barclaycard’s Ring credit card offering.

Crowdsourcing financial services is an interesting experiment. Most credit card issuers are less than transparent with their fee structures and policies, and cardholders have very little say when it comes to their terms.

Ring was one of the first cards to give cardholders the ability to vote on terms, such as the interest rate and late fees. Perhaps the most interesting aspect besides crowdsourcing was Barclaycard’s promise to share their card revenue figures and ultimately profits in the form of statement credits, or charitable contributions.

The introduction of this second community, one that leverages the thriving rewards card market, points to something nearly revolutionary. Barclays worked with Lithium Technologies to power the software behind the community driven card, which would facilitate voting, online forums for proposing ideas from which charity to donate to, community help, support or the design of the card itself.

All of this helps to promote loyalty and a sense of belonging to a community, which are fairly warm and fuzzy feelings for a cold sliver of plastic to evoke.

But… what’s the catch?

Since cardholders can vote on fees and terms, there’s the risk of suffering from a tyranny of the majority. If Barclays calls a vote to raise rates on the card, it might go through because of the profit sharing incentive. For example, Barclay’s Ring card has a late fee that is actually higher than what the company would charge normally due to cardholder input.

It’s an advancement in using technology and social media to benefit both cardholders and card issuers in the long run. There are some clear incentives for this to become the new normal for card issuers.