Loyalty and fan engagement is the lifeline of any sporting club. It’s their way of showing appreciation in return for the immense love and faith of their supporters. This symbiotic relationship between the team and their fans is what makes sports unique, exuberant, and zestful. Driving this relation in current times means building highly personalised, curated, and connected, experiences with the fan base. A prominent sports club used data-driven insights in partnership with a UK high street bank to create a personalized reward experience for their loyal fan base.

The Ab Initio solution collated data from various sources to deliver a seamless, multi-functional, loyalty card that combines match ticketing data, club loyalty program, and a payment gateway into a co-branded card, enabling fans to use this for all purchases within or outside of the sports club. The solution was built leveraging Ab Initio’s continuous flow and web service components to call an external API to send valid transaction details in real-time. Speed, error handling, retry (in case of error), Disaster Recovery, etc. are some of the important aspects of any B2C product and all of those were taken care of to create an efficient, fault tolerant and highly available system for a great user experience. Analytical business intelligence further helped the sports club unlock various insights on interaction patterns, drop out reasons, registration details, application errors, and more.

A single loyalty + prepaid card underpinned by a mobile app with transaction patterns, loyalty rewards, and curated personalized experiences, not only resulted in enhanced fan engagement but also helped build additional sources of revenue for the sports club and for the bank.