In 2019, the Managing Director of the Flying Blue loyalty program from Air France-KLM stated…
“We want to add 10,000 partners over the next five years so our members can earn points every day – even if they only fly once or twice per year – and Currency Alliance may be the only platform that can enable this scale.”
Since then, dozens of new partners have been added to the Flying Blue program via the Currency Alliance platform. This not only gives their loyalty program members more opportunities to earn miles, but also generates significant incremental revenue without the need to add personnel to the partner management team.
It has now been over five years since that objective was stated, and Flying Blue is able to scale partnerships by finding new potential partners via the Currency Alliance platform. More often, brands from France, The Netherlands, and many destination markets where Air France-KLM fly, send partnership requests to the Flying Blue team – expressing their interest in issuing Flying Blue miles to common customers to drive engagement.
The Flying Blue team leverages the Management Portal from Currency Alliance to manage partners at scale – from initial exploratory conversations to contracting, reporting, reconciliation and settlement. This avoids traditional methods of partner management that relied on dozens of spreadsheets, phone calls, and hundreds of emails.
Furthermore, Currency Alliance bears the effort to work with the partner to understand their capabilities or constraints to submit transactions, and adapt to each unique requirement. This could include an API integration, submitting transactions via batch files, reporting transactions manually, relying on card-linking technology from a 3rd party, or deploying white label solutions that identify the member at the POS. In all cases, Currency Alliance removes the complexity from the Flying Blue team and subsequently submits all transactions into the Flying Blue system in real time so all stakeholders have visibility that transactions were completed as expected.
Today, the partner management team at Flying Blue gets access to real-time information about each partner on the Currency Alliance platform. This allows them to monitor progress towards goals, benchmark partner performance, and rapidly prepare monthly or quarterly reports on the results of their partner collaborations.
