Starling Bank, Flux Ready to Help With Unresolved Loyalty Points

Loyalty program incentives can be a great way to advance return business and keep customers coming back. Most everyone loves the notion of something for nothing, after all, and in a sense loyalty programs provide just that. Sure, you have to buy things to get the necessary points, but in the end, it’s still free goodies. Sometimes, though, these programs don’t work as they should, and a new team-up between Starling Bank and Flux should go a long way toward helping out, as they revealed recently.

The new effort brings Flux’s digital loyalty program capability directly to the Starling Bank mobile app, the second part of an ongoing effort between the two companies that recently saw digital, itemized receipts added to the app. Now, Flux is bringing in a digital loyalty program tracker as well that should give users a better idea of what loyalty points they have, and where.

Now, any time someone uses a Starling card to pay at one of Flux’s retail partners, the Starling app will immediately reflect the points total available at that location. That’s good news to start, and it gets better; Flux is set to establish partnerships with a growing range of businesses—mostly in the UK by the look of it—that should make an already useful tool all the more valuable.

With 41 percent of UK shoppers turning to rewards programs, according to a Deloitte study, it’s clear that there’s room for just about anything that makes a rewards program easier, safer, or both to use. Better yet, around 10.3 million of those shoppers, at last estimate, have unused loyalty points, so setting up a system designed to make these loyalty programs easier to use should go down very nicely. The marketing practically writes itself, and can readily focus on an appeal to customers to “get their own money back” or the like.

Flux’s plan should be a winner in the end, and Starling Bank will likely benefit here as well. Loyalty programs are gaining a lot of ground as the new way to get and keep customers, and making these easier to navigate should only help further.