Truaxis Debuts Purchase Insights for StatementRewards Platform

REDWOOD CITY, Calif., Sept. 21, 2011 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, at the FinovateFall 2011 event in Manhattan, Truaxis (formerly BillShrink), the leading provider of data-driven personalized services, revealed the latest innovative enhancement to its StatementRewards platform—Purchase Insights.  Purchase Insights gives financial institutions the ability to provide unique personalized services that meet rising customer expectations, replace expensive traditional reward programs, create new revenue streams and increase customer loyalty.  The StatementRewards platform integrates directly within a bank's existing online and mobile interfaces.

To keep customers loyal, financial institutions must make the online banking experience go beyond checking account balances. Today's customers want free tools to allow them to bank whenever and wherever they are, as well as save them money and manage their finances. Further, Javelin Strategy & Research recently reported that financial institutions enjoy a three-to-one trust advantage over merchants or other third parties when it comes to delivering personalized services based upon customers' transaction data.

In a recent survey of users, 84% of respondents indicated that they would like to gain insight into their purchasing behavior automatically within their online statement versus registering their debit/credit information with a separate website.

In turn, the rollout of new banking innovations are converting offline bankers to online and bill pay bankers, an impact that Javelin estimates will reduce financial institutions' operating costs by $8.3 billion annually (1).

Introducing Purchase Insights

Using the StatementRewards' platform, which uses anonymous transactional data to deliver highly personalized offers matched to customers' existing shopping preferences, Purchase Insights provides customers with recommendations for merchants that people with similar spend patterns enjoy. Additionally, Purchase Insights delivers the industry's first merchant-level spend summaries that analyze merchant, category and location data to give consumers insight into their spending habits over time, providing perspective on where money is going and how it can best be spent.

Purchase Insights enhances the StatementRewards platform with the following three solutions:

• Transaction Genome Platform (Merchant Recommendations) – based upon customers' shopping preferences and patterns, Purchase Insights helps customers discover new merchants that millions like them love.
  • Survey findings show that nearly two-thirds of consumers would like "Netflix-like" recommendations on where to shop and eat based upon "similar shoppers."

• Social Benchmarking — allows users to compare their spending against multiple groups of people, including a national average and people like them. Bank customers can compare their spending across purchase categories, specific merchants, time periods or geographic location against US averages, state averages, demographic sectors or even compare their spend against a created, private group of friends and family contacts.  
  • Two out of three people surveyed would like to know how their spending habits compare against the national average, as well as against people with similar shopping habits.

• Summary of Spend – delivers graphical reports of where consumers are spending their money, including the industry's first merchant-specific reporting, specifically:
  • Purchase category (e.g. restaurants)
  • Merchant (e.g. Starbucks)
  • Time period (e.g. monthly, quarterly)
  • Geographic location (e.g. purchases made near work, near home or on vacation)

"There is a great opportunity to respond to consumer demand for an enhanced banking experience," said Schwark Satyavolu, CEO and Co-Founder of Truaxis. "With a three-to-one trust advantage over third-party providers that analyze transaction data, banks are well positioned to create deeper relationships with customers and increase adoption of online and mobile channels, while tapping into customer-friendly revenue sources."

"Financial institutions should strongly consider ways to implement next-generation digital finance tools as a strategy to leverage their trust advantage over independent websites, offering features that are in-demand by consumers and promote high-value relationships between FIs and their accountholders," said Mark Schwanhausser, Senior Analyst, Multi-Channel Financial Services at Javelin Strategy & Research.  "Our research shows that customers want tools that will give them better control and insight into their finances and with access to real time transaction data, FIs are well positioned to foster loyalty through the delivery of actionable financial advice. This in turn gives FIs an opportunity to reinvigorate online banking, drive the adoption of mobile banking and greatly reduce operating costs."

The StatementRewards Platform

Since launching in October 2010, StatementRewards has expanded its core platform beyond merchant-funded rewards (tailored rewards based upon customers' existing shopping habits) and personalized bill analysis (analysis of recurring monthly bills that can save customers on average $1,000) to offer a complete suite of data-driven personalized services that help banks and merchants build positive relationships with their customers.

In addition to today's announcement of Purchase Insight enhancements, the StatementRewards platform also includes these features:

• Unified Loyalty Card — enhances bank and credit union credit and debit cards to create a multi-merchant loyalty card that manages all merchant benefits in one place.
• Highly Personalized Offers – delivers in-statement discounts and merchant offers that are tailored to customers' existing shopping preferences and generated from their transactions, spend, location and type of purchase at national and local merchants, all without using any personally identifiable information.
• Reward Discovery — shows consumers what additional rewards may be available based on expanding their relationships with select merchants.
• Mobile Geo-Location — generates more attractive rewards depending upon a users' physical proximity to stores and past shopping habits.
• Exclusive Personalized Bill Analysis – analyzes customers' largest recurring monthly expenses – such as wireless plans, TV service and gas bills – against millions of available plan options and find customers an average annual savings of $1,000.

Truaxis' presentation at FinovateFall 2011 is scheduled for Wednesday, September 21, 2011 at 10:00 am ET at Pier 92 in Manhattan.

Truaxis has published today on its website the whitepaper "Beyond Merchant-Funded Rewards:  Aligning Customers, Financial Institutions and Merchants with Data-Driven Personalized Services," that includes survey findings and research on next-generation personalized financial services. To download this whitepaper, please visit www.truaxis.com/press/purchase-insights-whitepaper.

About Truaxis  

Truaxis (formerly known as BillShrink), the company behind StatementRewards and BillShrink.com, is working with the country's leading financial institutions and merchants to deliver the market's most comprehensive data-driven personalized services platform.  

Launched in October 2010, Truaxis' StatementRewards platform leverages sophisticated analytics and matching capabilities to deliver a broad spectrum of data-driven services, including in-statement loyalty rewards that transform the relationships between banks and merchants, help better serving their customers and build brand loyalty. StatementRewards uses secure matching technology and anonymous user transaction data to pair users with personalized merchant offers and recommendations, as well as powering other rich features like a unified loyalty card, social benchmarking spend comparisons, and mobile and social rewards. 

Truaxis' free consumer site, BillShrink.com, has helped 1.6 million Americans find potential savings of more than $1 billion by delivering personalized money-saving recommendations on their most common household bills. In an era when eight out of 10 people overpay on their everyday expenses, BillShrink.com sorts through millions of products and services – a billion cable and satellite packages, 10 million cell phone plan combinations, and 150,000 gas stations – to provide unbiased recommendations so users can get exactly what they need at the best price.

Truaxis' award-winning technologies have been recognized twice by Finovate as a "Best in Show" and have received accolades from The New York Times, American Banker, Consumer Reports, Forbes, The Today Show, CNN, FOX, ABC and CBS, among others. Truaxis is headquartered in Redwood City, California. For more information, please visit www.truaxis.com.

(1) Javelin Strategy & Research, October 2010 "2010 Online Banking & Bill Payment Forecast"

SOURCE Truaxis