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Happy Prime Day, A.K.A. the unofficial kickoff to the back-to-school season.

To help advertisers make the most of the second-largest shopping season of the year, we’ve analyzed $2.4 trillion in purchase data through our banking partners to identify five key spend trends. Here’s a closer look at trend #1:

Back-To-School Spend Grows Online, but the Majority Still Occurs In-Store

From 2017-2018, total back-to-school spend grew 2.5% compared to the previous year, as more customers went online versus in-store to check off their school supply lists.

While purely eCommerce retailers like Amazon were the fastest-growing channel, traditional Brick & Mortars helped offset the decline in spend at their physical stores by driving sales online. Their online and mobile properties—what we call Brick&Mortar.coms—saw a 0.3 increase in share points year-over-year.

Worth noting, physical stores still account for the large majority (79%) of actual back-to-school spend, although their share of that spend is decreasing.

Actionable Tip

Brick & Mortar retailers with a strong online presence should consider offering a ship-to-store option during the back-to-school season. Once the customer is in store to pick up their online order, they may often be inspired to do some additional shopping.

Want more Back-to-School Insights?

Check out more key spend trends here and stay tuned for our next blog post tomorrow, when we’ll dig deeper into spend trend #2: Early Sales Give Online-Only Retailers an Edge on Back-to-School.

School may be out for the summer, but with Amazon Prime Day just hours away, the 2019 back-to-school shopping season is officially here.Back-to-school is the second-largest shopping event of the year following the December holidays. Excluding the weeks leading up to Christmas, it accounts for nearly 20% of annual spend.By analyzing $2.4 trillion in purchase data across our banking partners, Cardlytics has identified five key trends for advertisers to consider this season: 1. Back-To-School Spend Grows Online, but the Majority Still Occurs In-Store

Download the high-resolution image[/caption] 2. Early Sales Give Online-Only Retailers an Edge on Back-to-School

Download the high-resolution image[/caption] 3. Convenience Reigns Supreme During Back-to-School

Download the high-resolution image[/caption]

Download the high-resolution image[/caption]4. Omni-Shoppers Drive Incremental Value During Back-to-School

Download the high-resolution image[/caption] 5. Fall Lays the Foundation for More Holiday Sales

Download the high-resolution image[/caption] Want more Back-to-School insights? We’ll be digging deeper into each of these trends, so don’t forget to check back in the coming days for more insights and tips to make sure you are getting an A+ in capturing spend throughout the season.

As concerns over Brexit mounted in 2018, consumer spending on the UK’s high streets was anything but ‘strong and stable’. And across the dining sector, down-sizing and deep discounting dominated the headlines.

But while consumers spent cautiously on the UK’s high street, their appetite for apps, speed and convenience allowed the delivery economy to emerge as the overall success story last year.

Delivery Dominates

With overall spend up almost 20% from 2017, delivery services almost single-handedly drove growth in the dining sector.

In 2018 alone, Just Eat surpassed 400 million orders in the UK while Domino’s recorded its largest ever sales day in the UK– so there’s no doubt that the meteoric rise of the delivery economy will continue. In fact, the average spend per order on delivery services bucked the broader sector trend and even outpaced traditional restaurants, rising to an all-time high of £20.56 in 2018, compared with a steady decline to just under £20 for physical restaurants.

Appetite for Apps

Hungry app users continue to be attracted by the convenience of choosing and paying for their food from the comfort of their sofa. This popularity of delivery apps hasn’t gone unnoticed by traditional food-to-go brands, who are taking heed and responding by innovating their service models.

In 2018, McDonald’s and Greggs introduced their own click-and-collect apps to optimise speed and convenience for walk-in customers. The success of brands such as Deliveroo, Just Eat and UberEats isn’t just down to their customer experience offer. They also have an advantage over traditional food chains, given their endless options to choose from. It’s the equivalent of the eating-out industry’s Amazon effect.

Delivery platforms have seen that the traditional takeaway, like pizza and Chinese, has evolved to a point where consumers are instead ordering gourmet health foods, deserts, coffees - and in some cases Michelin star meals - at the click of a button.

This shift toward healthier preferences is being driven primarily by the younger consumer, aged 19-28, which has helped lunch brands like Leon and Pret a Manger grow in popularity with spend on salads, soups and sandwiches, up 5% last year.

While many attribute the rise of delivery services to Millennials and Gen Z’s, the surivial of the model may well hang on its appeal with older consumers having deeper pockets. In fact, those aged 49-58 spent on average £2.50 more per order in 2018 than the 19-28-year-olds.

Which trends will continue?

As consumers increasingly opt for eating-in over dining-out, it’s no secret that traditional brick-and-mortar restaurants are feeling the pressure. But it’s not all doom and gloom for restaurants, particularly those who offer delivery services and healthier menu items.

Facing the headwinds by embracing these platforms, as well as consumer taste trends, could well pay dividends. What’s more, tapping into areas like door-to-door delivery and click-and-collect, a desire for healthier choices and other new marketing platforms could be the recipe for success in 2019.

In the UK, Open Banking has so far focused on making customer bank data more portable and accessible. As we move towards the September PSD2 deadline, all payment accounts will be brought into scope.

Open banking has always had ambitions beyond bank and payment data. It’s a vision of consumers possessing greater control of all personal financial data, in turn driving greater competition across all financial services.

Therefore, in some respects, ‘open banking’ is a limiting moniker. ‘Open banking’ is not just about bank data. It’s also about loans, pensions and mortgages.

‘Open banking’ is now evolving towards ‘open finance’ – giving consumers access to all their financial data.

And it’s the world of pensions that looks most likely to be opened up next.

The logic is sound. The average person in the UK has 11 jobs in their lifetime. That could mean 11 different pension pots to manage and monitor by the time you retire.

The FCA, in conjunction with The Pensions Regulator, has already identified several key issues. These were published in their joint regulatory strategy at the end of 2018.

They include tackling how pensions are looked after and managed, as well as the need to enable consumers to make good decisions in terms of their pension planning.

Anyone who has more than one pension pot knows that managing them is not straightforward. It’s time consuming to keep an eye on them and both their charging structures and performance are complex and sometimes opaque.

You may be able to get better performing funds or lower fees and charges elsewhere. But there is no mechanism for making these kinds of comparisons easy.

So that’s the next frontier for open banking. Or open finance, as we should perhaps call it. Imagine being able to compare your pension’s performance and value in the same way that you compare insurance providers today. A world where all of your pension data is portable and can be instantly judged against every other provider.

It will revolutionise the pension industry. Pension providers will have to become more proactive and competitive or risk disintermediation by the raft of fintechs and other providers shaking up how consumers can more easily manage their money.

Work is already underway in this area. The government’s “pensions dashboard” is specifically designed to create a platform on which savers can easily view and manage their retirement pots.

Already, companies in the industry are showing interest in trying to make pensions data more open and accessible. Last year, PensionBee, a pension consolidation platform, said it was working on integrating with banks and money apps, with users able to see their live pension balance within the money app, Yolt.

While such initiatives are encouraging, they likely impact only a small portion of total savers up and down the country. The game-changer will be the involvement of the larger, established pensions providers, and the opening-up of pensions data more broadly.

The delivery of ‘open pensions’ will likely take time but it will benefit from the experience and regulatory framework that the UK’s Open Banking work has delivered. There are some clear lessons to be learned, some of which – trust, awareness, customer experience all underpinned by a clear value exchange – I’ve discussed before.

It doesn’t end with pensions. There’s scope for the entire financial services industry to benefit from greater access of customer data. Given the scale of such product complexity and opacity, particularly around things like fees and charges, it’s easy to see how a compelling offer to consumers could be developed.

Open Banking is dead. Long live Open Finance.

Nearly 14 months on from the launch of the UK’s version of open banking, we continue to move slowly towards its goal of creating greater competition in financial services by making customer data more portable and accessible. It’s less of a sprint, more a marathon.

But important progress is being made. Recently, M&S Bank introduced a new service that uses open banking to speed up mortgage applications. Customers can now use a secure open banking platform to share their financial records, rather than supplying current account statements manually.

However, great propositions are only one piece of the Open Banking jigsaw.

Our research has identified the key elements needed for the development of successful Open Banking products and services. Chief among them is the customer experience.

Put simply, a compelling proposition has to be backed by good user experience. There is little point stoking customer demand and interest if users are frustrated by a poor experience when they attempt to take advantage of the product or service.

Currently, the account linking process is a real friction point in the Open Banking customer journey. Right now, most users who start the Open Banking linking process don’t complete it.

That’s not a sustainable conversion rate for any business.

And that friction in the user experience is caused by a number of factors.

Most important is the authentication process.

The reality is that digital-savvy bank customers access their accounts daily using their mobile banking app. The painful experience of initially logging into the mobile banking application is a one-off event. Pin codes, fingerprints and facial recognition then become the log-in mechanism.

This means that bank customers now struggle to remember the assortment of customer IDs, passwords and memorable information required to authenticate their accounts. That’s the information that’s buried away in a lever-arch file or drawer at home.

But that’s the information that’s needed to link an Open Banking account for the CMA9 banks.

As a result, many Open Banking-enabled products fall at the first hurdle. Time-poor customers are giving up because the information needed to link their own account to the new service is not easily accessible.

Linking through biometric authentication, or other simple means, is key to conversion.

Compare the account linking process from the CMA9 to the account linking process for Monzo and Starling. They have created two-factor app-to-app authentication processes using QR codes and e-mail addresses which are easy for customers to use, but still safe and secure for account linking.

As a consequence, the Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE), the body responsible for the UK’s Open Banking standards, has created a set of customer experience guidelines together with a mandate for all CMA9 banks – the UK’s nine largest banks, all of which have been ordered by CMA to implement open banking – to have implemented app-to-app authentication functionality by mid-March.

The rapid roll-out of these user experience improvements are absolutely critical to the success of Open Banking. The whole industry is waiting with bated breath.

Manohar Reddy Dendi, Director of Engineering[/caption]After wrapping up a successful opening ceremony on February 18th, Cardlytics is proud to announce our official entry into Asia. Our newest office is located in India’s Sunrise State of Andhra Pradesh in the city of Visakhapatnam (Vizag)—a growing hotspot for Fintech innovation—and will help Cardlytics advance our research and development capabilities.Leading the day-to-day onsite management is our new Director of Engineering, Manohar Reddy Dendi. Manohar has more than 18 years’ experience in enterprise IT and software development. Prior to joining Cardlytics, he managed NCR Corporation’s Managed Services division for India and APAC.We sat down with Manohar to ask some questions about the new office.Why did Cardlytics choose (and how do you pronounce) Visakhapatnam as our first Asian outpost? MANOHAR: We get that question all the time. It’s Vih-shaa-kaa-puht-nuhm. Many of India’s brightest workers are flocking to Visakhapatnam—or Vizag as the locals call it—to help advance the Fintech revolution that’s transforming the region. As a company that cares about its people, our location in Vizag offers our employees and their families good medical facilities and world-class schools. It also has lower traffic and pollution compared to other cities in the country.Can you tell us more about the opening ceremony this week?MANOHAR: The grand opening began with a ribbon cutting by Cardlytics CEO & Co-Founder Scott Grimes and COO & Co-Founder Lynne Laube. Several other Cardlytics executives traveled to Vizag to share in the celebration and present Cardlytics’ 10-year journey as well as plans for future growth. Speakers included Scott, Lynne, Sathish Gaddipati (Chief Technology Officer), and Peter Gleason (President of International Operations). Also gracing the occasion were members of the Andhra Pradesh government, industry colleagues, university representatives, the media, and last but not least, our esteemed employees and their families.

The Cardlytics team, friends, and family celebrating the India Office Opening Ceremony[/caption]

From left: Peter Gleason, Lynne Laube, Sathish Gaddipati, and Scott Grimes[/caption]From a design and branding perspective, how does the new Cardlytics office compare with other office spaces in India?MANOHAR: When we set out to design the new office, it was important that our new space reflect our distinctive workspace in our Atlanta headquarters as well as the local ambiance. The result was a truly unique space, inspired by our collaborative spirit and desire to nurture innovation. The India office features colorful murals, spacious work areas, advanced technology, and a dedicated recreation area to give Cardlytians the space they need to grow and develop new ideas.

Cardlytics office workspace and mural in Visakhapatnam (Vizag), India[/caption]Are you hiring?MANOHAR: Yes, we are always looking for great talent and actively hiring for several positions in the Vizag office. I encourage anyone interested in joining the team to visit our website for the latest list of job openings.Interested in joining the Cardlytics team or in learning more about career opportunities in any of our offices? Check out our careers page.

The team testing out our new Cardlytics-branded rickshaw[/caption]

As the country gears up for this Sunday’s final showdown between the Patriots and the Rams, restaurants are kicking off a battle for football fans’ stomachs. To help restaurants score a win, Cardlytics analyzed restaurant and delivery spend during the week of last year’s Big Game. Here are some of the highlights:

The Feast of Champions

Fans’ favorite foods are as different as the teams on the field. While the Patriots fans in Boston overwhelmingly preferred pizza—spending 187 percent more at pizzerias the week of the 2018 game compared to an average week—Rams fans in LA indulged in tacos.

The Top 10

Fans in these cities provided the biggest boost to their hometown restaurants. The leaders on the scoreboard? Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Dallas.

Wings rule

Chicken restaurants in Atlanta—this year’s host city and Cardlytics’ hometown—saw a 128 percent boost in sales during the week leading up to the Big Game.

Want to win more share of stomach on game day, or any day for that matter? Contact us today to get started.

The 2018 holiday season is a wrap, and there are many lessons for retailers to apply to their 2019 plans. With overall holiday sales up 1.6% year-over-year from 2017 to 2018, here are some of the biggest takeaways for retailers looking to keep the momentum going well into the New Year.

1. Focus on convenience

U.S. online holiday shopping had a record-breaking season, and many traditional Brick & Mortars benefited from this trend by driving sales online. While in-store spend remained relatively flat, their online and mobile properties (think Walmart.com, Target.com, Costco.com) saw a 3.1% year-over-year increase in holiday sales. Brick & Mortar retailers should continue to play up their online channels while also emphasizing convenience for their physical locations: the hands-on experience and peace of mind when receiving your items on time and in one piece.

2. Make procrastinating easy

Retailers may be kicking off their sales earlier and earlier, but procrastination is still on the rise. Customers who rushed to finish their holiday shopping between Black Friday and Christmas had a major impact—both in-store and online. For online retailers in particular, Black Friday/Cyber Monday was more important in 2018 vs. the previous year, and continuing to offer quick-turn shipping brought them another final push of last-minute shoppers. Regardless of the season or holiday, appeal to procrastinators by highlighting store hours, inventory assurance tools, and shopping guides. Win more online sales by offering express shipping.

3. Win the hearts of animal lovers

Many shoppers spoiled their furry friends this holiday season. Pet retailers saw an increase of 7% in year-over-year holiday sales—one of the biggest increases of any category—beating out traditional holiday categories like children’s toys & apparel and department stores. Now with millennials as the biggest pet owning generation, we expect the trend of spending on the four-legged family members is here to stay (pun absolutely intended). Retailers can fetch more of this growing spend by providing quality products geared towards pets and pet lovers alike.

Want to put these insights into action? Contact us today to learn how Cardlytics Direct can help you identify likely buyers and drive incremental sales both in-store and online.

This week marks a year since Open Banking was introduced in the UK. Designed to create greater competition in financial services by making customer data more portable and accessible, many had high hopes.

The UK’s Open Banking initiative provided two elements that were missing from the initial PSD2 legislation, the EU’s own similar payments directive: a technical specification and a supporting regulatory framework. This made the UK the most advanced market for Open Banking in the world. As a result, other markets were keeping a close eye on progress to inform their own initiatives.

A year on, where are we now?

While most people knew that there wouldn’t be a ‘big bang’ moment, it’s fair to say that, on the surface, little has changed.

Relatively few compelling propositions have been launched and consumer awareness remains low. The mainstream financial services landscape in the UK looks the same as it did before January last year.

Other consumer-facing sectors, such as retail, were also expected to be transformed through access to Open Banking data, together with low-cost payment opportunities. Here, too, very little has changed.

Amid this gloomy outlook, we sought to find chinks of light. Open Banking has the potential to transform financial services, and more broadly how consumers engage with a range of other businesses. But this won’t just happen overnight. How can we get there?

Cardlytics recently commissioned a study to look at prospects for Open Banking a year since its launch. We asked bank customers who they trust with their data and what kinds of value exchange would turn heads.

In short, we were looking for Open Banking’s tipping point.

What we found were four areas that are key to reaching it: trust, awareness, customer experience, and value exchange.

Trust is the most fundamental issue. Over the last few decades, consumers have been warned not to share their bank details with anyone. Even though Open Banking provides a framework for consumers to safely share their data, old habits will die hard. Anyone who has tried the Open Banking process will, without doubt, have that moment of hesitation as they enter their banking details to connect their account to a third-party proposition. Customer experience will be key to overcoming this, but we should also consider some kind of ‘trust mark’ for the Open Banking ecosystem to help reassure.

Awareness is less about knowledge of ‘Open Banking’ as a phrase, and more about the propositions that encourage usage. Given the challenge faced by banks to engage customers beyond just functional operations, profile-raising campaigns will have to do a lot of the heavy lifting.

As mentioned above, key to the Open Banking success will be making the account-linking process simple, secure, and fast. We’re a world away from this. Improving it, through measures such as a consistent customer experience and biometric authentication, is essential.

Finally, the customer value exchange underpins all of this. The value exchange must be so good that consumers will put aside their initial hesitations and start connecting their accounts in order to benefit from new propositions. Therefore, it’s imperative to understand what resonates. We found that young people love daily rewards, while older consumers prefer a reduction in their household bills.

So, while little has changed, as we head into year two big opportunities do remain – for both banks and other brands – if these four areas can be addressed and, importantly, they can tap into Open Banking’s ‘tipping point’.