A New Card-Linked Loyalty Program: Estimated and Anticipated Benefits for Payment Transaction Parties

Electronic card payments are getting more and more popular, mainly because of their simplicity, convenience, processing time and high level of security. The fact that a single payment card is issued for a particular cardholder makes it possible to link a card to various services. In this paper, we investigated a usage of a payment card in the loyalty program that incorporates our Contextual Risk Management System (CRMS) to assure a novel intangible reward: Shorter transaction processing time. In the beginning, we emphasize the importance of soft benefits in modern loyalty programs and recall the risk management algorithms and the reputation system that has been used in the CRMS. Then, using an extensive dataset of 2.5 million payment transaction traces (collected within a year from 68 terminals) we estimate potential benefits for merchants and cardholders and try to predict an effect of this system for the future. We also discuss the impact of this system on the real and user-perceived security level.