First Abu Dhabi Bank, the largest bank in the Middle East, now uses Currency Alliance as its standard means for loyalty program members to exchange out of the bank’s loyalty currency into popular airline or hotel group loyalty programs.
The benefits for banking clients include a single standard API to connect with any partner they want – without the need to understand the complexities of their many partners’ heterogenous loyalty systems. Furthermore, there’s no need to put each new partner through extensive security due diligence because there’s no direct API interface with the partner.
Similarly, the dozens of banks using Currency Alliance for this use case can choose the airlines, hotel groups, coalitions, or other loyalty programs that are most interesting for its members, and Currency Alliance provides the connectivity for real-time exchanges. Real-time exchange means that a member exchanging points will typically see their points value in the other program within one second – unlike the majority of other exchange solutions in the world, that can take days.
A global marketplace of travel loyalty programs
Airlines, hotel groups, or other partners collaborating with banks on the Currency Alliance platform include Qatar Airways, Saudia Airlines, British Airways, Iberia, Air France-KLM, Etihad, Singapore Airlines, AirAsia, Air India, Garuda-Indonesia, Ethiopian Airlines, Melia Hotels, and dozens of others.
In some cases, the bank doesn’t even need commercial agreements directly with each partner, because Currency Alliance can assume the responsibility to reconcile and settle on behalf of all partners. Extensive contracting can therefore be avoided, and with our ability to meet local payment requirements or restrictions, there is greatly reduced complexity in making smaller payments to many partners.
This simplified approach to partner collaboration keeps up-front costs down, while giving loyalty program members much greater choice in how they spend their loyalty value.
Of course, Currency Alliance allows each partner to contract directly with partners individually if they want to, but we are finding that brands are motivated to consolidate these processes to reduce indirect operating costs.
