UOB partners Fave for new loyalty and rewards initiative

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United Overseas Bank (UOB) has partnered with Southeast Asia consumer fintech platform Fave to launch the UOB Rewards+ initiative. Aiming to disrupt the traditional banking rewards experience, this alliance brings together two rewards and loyalty programmes in Singapore together. The initiative will be under UOB's new unified digital platform, UOB TMRW which attempts to make banking simpler, transparent and engaging for its customers.

“The rewards redemption experience for customers today leaves much to be desired as it can be cumbersome," said the head of group personal financial services at UOB, Jacquelyn Tan (pictured right). In fact, consumers in Singapore want more clarity. From a market research conducted by UOB, 87% of the respondents wanted a breakdown of the reward points that have been accumulated. Through UOB's continued digital investment, Tan added that the bank has committed SG$500 million over the next five years across ASEAN on its UOB TMRW app, where users are able to bank, manage and meet lifestyle priorities.

According to UOB, the bank recognises that scale, transparency and a personalised experience are key to changing the traditional rewards system for all consumers. With this knowledge, UOB partnered with Fave to double the number of merchant locations in UOB's reward programme. The UOB Rewards+ programme features the bank’s proprietary digital engagement engine, which brings together solutions in artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and data analytics to personalise the reward experience for each customer. With every transaction made, UOB is able to learn and reward redemption patterns to recommend relevant deals to the consumer. Additionally, the digital engagement engine also powers up UOB TMRW’s market-pioneering insights feature, which provides personalised prompts to help customers spend and save more wisely.

UOB is also offering UOB Rewards+ as part of the bank’s bid to encourage more UOB customers to support local businesses. Through this initiative, participating merchants can accept payment in UNI$ which enables businesses to tap into a larger pool of customers.

Meanwhile, the regional managing director of Fave Singapore and Malaysia, Ng Aik-Phong (pictured left) said the partners and customers would stand to benefit from the expanded rewards ecosystem. "For our merchants, the opportunity to reach out to a broader customer base and for our customers, an additional channel to stack their rewards, earning both UOB rewards and Fave cashback," Ng explained.

Separately in April this year, Fave was acquired by Pine Labs for over US$45 million. Pine Labs is a merchant commerce platform based in India and Malaysia that serves prominent large, mid-sized and small merchants across Asia and the Middle East. With this acquisition, Indian consumers will be able to use Fave app later this year to save across 500,000 merchant network points powered by Pine Labs across 3,700 cities in India.

Fave's co-founder and CEO Joel Neoh told MARKETING-INTERACTIVE that the employees will specifically focus on data science, engineering and product for Southeast Asia. It is also looking to recruit for business development and marketing for local teams in Southeast Asia and India. "We already have 30 staff in India and are planning to hire more," Neoh said.

The acquisition will help both companies accelerate their growth in the Asia region and unlock massive consumer opportunities across retail, F&B, fashion, and FMCG markets. Fave said joining forces with Pine Labs will reinforce its market position in Southeast Asia. Both companies are aiming to onboard between five to 10 million consumers on its smart payments platform in the first phase.

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