Largest UAE bank uses Sitecore to deliver hyper-personalized offers

Founded in 1963, Emirates NBD is one of the largest banking groups in the Middle East and is ranked among the top 20 in the Forbes’ list of the World’s Best Regarded Companies. It provides a wide range of consumer and business financial services, controlling 24% of the consumer credit card market. But in the mature United Arab Emirates (UAE) market where customers can quickly switch banks, the company had to find a new and innovative way to retain and attract customers, and build brand loyalty. Rather than cutting prices or introducing new products, Emirates NBD needed to change the way customers engaged with the bank’s credit card services.

Emirates NBD’s More lifestyle app has around 4,000 deals for different retailers and services including restaurants, cafes, hotels, stores, auto repair, and rental companies. The bank has a reward-based incentive program that offers discounts to customers, but the brand was struggling to differentiate and get the most relevant offers based on interests in front of the right customers every time.

Emirates NBD worked with Sitecore and Sitecore business partner, Horizontal Digital, to launch their native lifestyle app called More. To improve personalization, Emirates NBD has expanded its use of Sitecore on Microsoft Azure as a PaaS deployment to give customers highly targeted and tailored deals via the More app.

The bank leveraged Sitecore technology to build profiles based on known customer information like affluence and earnings; customer-selected preferences during app onboarding; ongoing preference choices during app use; in-app behavior; and geo-location. For example, a ‘Let’s get to know you’ setup stage on the app allows users to select a variety of preferences. As a result, the app ‘learns’ the preferences and interests of each individual so the customer gets more offers and deals based on real-life transactions, not just user preferences, allowing for true personalization. For example, if a customer says they go to the gym, but spend most of their free time dining out, it’s the restaurant vouchers they’ll see first.

Rather than just adding features or making services better, Sitecore enables Emirates NBD to improve the way customers feel about and experience those services. Since launching the Sitecore-powered, commerce-as-a-service to enhance the More lifestyle app, there have been over 30,000 app downloads with a target of over 100,000 downloads over the next six months.

The solution offers a simple customer purchase experience. It builds better customer relationships using the More app to support and enhance a customer's lifestyle through transactional targeting with offers and deals that are customized specifically for each customer. The More app provides Emirates NBD customers with a one-stop shopping experience to purchase products and services and easily save money. The experience includes most of the top brands and vendors customers are looking for, including Mussafair, ClearTrip, Network International, noon.ae, Amazon, Mastercard, Platinum List and more.