August 25 Loyalty Market Update

Here’s your August loyalty update for Australia and New Zealand from Ellipsis, The Loyalty Experts^®.  We share the highlights below, subscribe to receive the detailed monthly market update. 

What matters this month

The “Reverse Robin Hood” of credit card rewards

Credit card rewards cards are under pressure from regulators globally and our regulators are acting in both Australia (discussion stage) and New Zealand (implementing in November). They’ll cut interchange by half or more. This is the funding line for credit card rewards which themselves account for 30% of all the loyalty funding in each country’s loyalty ecosystems. Both regulators are doing it at the same time and to the same world record low level of 0.3%. We step through the facts, the international precedents and the opportunities in our regular market update roadshow meetings (email me if you’re interested).

Australia

• The RBA will cut credit card interchange fees to 0.3%.
  
  
• Qantas Loyalty faces a privacy complaint over the 5.7 million customer breach and got a court order to restrict leaked data.
  
  
• It also increased points needed for rewards, while Virgin will launch a higher Platinum Plus tier.
  
  
• Uber One loyalty program revenue rose 44%, Reflections Holidays loyalty grew 20% and Qantas partnered with Adairs.
  
  
• TerryWhite Chemmart expanded its TWC Connect platform to 620 pharmacies nationwide.
  
  
• Commonwealth Bank’s CommBank Connect network reaches 16 million customers.
  
  
• New loyalty programs launched from Sheike, Platypus Shoes and PartsCheck.

New Zealand

• Credit card interchange will drop to 0.3% (by more than half).
  
  
• Z Energy’s new Z Rewards replaced Flybuys, lifted scan rates from 3% to ~25%, with 346,000 app downloads in three months and 30% of users being new customers.
  
  
• New World’s Clubcard was hit by a cyber-attack, temporarily suspending redemptions, while Qantas’s breach affected 5.7 million members, including 1 million in New Zealand, where membership grew by 100,000 in 2024.

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