Anticipating the banking experiences our customers want is key to driving tech innovation at Barclays.
Nowhere is this clearer than in Barclays US. With more than 20 million customers, Barclays US Consumer Bank is a top-10 issuer in the largest credit card market in the world. We partner with some of the US’s most successful airline, travel, entertainment, and retail institutions to create customised credit card programmes that drive customer loyalty and engagement.
Through Barclays partnership with JetBlue, our technology teams knew it was an opportunity to deliver a step-change in the services and experiences being offered to cardholders. JetBlue is a global travel company with an award-winning reputation for innovation and service. The refreshed JetBlue Credit Cards needed to enhance the level of experiences offered throughout the JetBlue customer journey.
The program’s objective was to improve the customer experience and increase acquisitions by transforming the benefits offered across the product suite, refreshing the marketing for existing products, enhancing digital servicing, and integrating the card into the enhanced TrueBlue loyalty programmes.
Sachin Jadhav is Head of Servicing Product Technology at US Consumer Bank.
We’re proud we were able to achieve a triple win: Customers receive expanded flexibility in using their points and a more seamless Customer experience, JetBlue benefits from greater loyalty with a card program fully interconnected to their TrueBlue program, and Barclays benefits from greater engagement from our Customers and trust from our partner.
Over 500 colleagues collaborated to build the new enhancements. They upgraded points redemption capabilities, modernised the rewards experience, created a new Rewards Hub, digitised the card lost/stolen journey, and streamlined the customer application experience.
Alongside introducing new customer capabilities, the team also upgraded the u. To monitor the execution of the project, we developed a fully automated tool leveraging widgets offered by Confluence, to deliver a real-time update on the status of every part of the development cycle. This highlighted any blockers to progress for the tech and programme leads to unblock. By making it easier and more efficient for our internal teams to work together, we were able to deliver more benefits, faster, for the customer.
Rohini Sharma, Programme Manager on the programme. “Over the course of a program that is involved and multi-faceted, you have to stay agile. I’m proud that our teams were so receptive, flexible and resilient. It meant that we were able to deal with changing aims and parameters while still ensuring time, budget and quality were not compromised.”
The results were worth all the hard work. Following the release of the new tech features in March 2023, the JetBlue Card was named Money’s Best for Domestic Travel Card 2023, ranked 2nd for best airline card in USA Today’s Reader’s Choice awards 2023 and the JetBlue Plus Card has been named JD Power’s #1 Airline Co-Branded Credit Card.
Those awards are recognition for delivering better experiences for customers. By upgrading the spend tracker feature, we were able to keep customers informed on their pathway to meeting the threshold to receive their acquisition bonus. Further, after the launch of the new Rewards Hub, customer engagement on our digital channels increased significantly. Unique visits on the consumer website surged by 36% and the mobile app by 25%. Notably, Rewards Hub now has a 26% share of total unique visits on the web and a huge 39% on the mobile app. Both the spend tracker and the Rewards Hub helped to drive reduced call volumes as Cardmembers had access to the information they needed to address questions regarding their account.
The refreshed offering also pioneers a new redemption option called Points Payback. This allowed customers who don’t have any travel plans on the horizon to save cash by using the points they’d earned for statement credit.
From a pure technology point of view, the pioneering JetBlue Card programme has created a number of new standards and methodologies which the team is drawing for other partner programmes.
“For our people, three things really stood out about the project. One was that engineers love solving problems. And there were lots of interesting challenges to meet customer needs. The second was that everyone, across JetBlue and Barclays, worked together as one team. Thirdly, the power to achieve our strategic ambition of being the premier choice for America's best brands is enabled through the flexibility and utility of our technological capabilities,” explains Sachin.
In the end, it’s not just the card itself that’s gaining plaudits. The JetBlue programme team has just won Team of the Year at the 2024 Barclays US Group Technology Awards.
Technology that makes a positive difference to Barclays, our partners and our customers. It’s happening here.
