To issue a card, the necessary certifications must be obtained from brands such as MasterCard, Visa, Troy, and Discover, and the card must be made available for cardholder use.
Banks aim to increase customer loyalty by running points programs and similar campaigns. Earning points is important, but being able to use the points earned and having easy access to places where they can be redeemed is just as important.
Discover, wanting to make it easy for cardholders to spend the points and miles they earn, announced that it will partner with PayPal for this purpose.
- As part of the partnership, cardholders with a Discover-branded card will be able to use their points at PayPal merchants.
- Going forward, starting in July 2020, Discover cardholders will earn 5% in points on the payments they make at PayPal merchants.
PayPal's network currently includes 24 million merchants.
Discover had recently announced that it had also started supporting the P2P money transfer network Zelle.
In light of the information above, we can comfortably say that payment schemes will not remain limited to card-based transactions, and will expand their use cases through new integrations and channels. I can say that in the coming years we will see increasingly intertwined structures.
So who benefits from this kind of partnership?
Without question, this kind of partnership benefits end users. And the payment scheme that satisfies end users the most will further grow its usage network.
