On the heels of announcing two seperate partnerships this month, ActivePath’s Chief Executive Renan Levy dropped by the Bank Innovation offices last week to share some of his visions for his two-way secure email company and the email channel as a whole. The short of our conversation underscored the importance of banks and ecommerce players improving what consumers can do through their emails as a method for increasing transactions.
“I like relevant things to come for me. I don’t want to go in and search,” Levy tells Bank Innovation. “Email is limited to date.”
ActivePath aims to modernize the email channel by allowing consumers to engage in transactions — such as balance transfers, bill pay or reward redemption — within the body of an email. ActivePath’s recent deal with transaction-driven marketing firm Cardlytics this month, for example, opens another retail communication channel for offers, Levy says. In other words, the partnership essentially allows retailers to embed offers into electronic bank statements, which consumers within an email receive, view and transact through. In turn, a consumer has no need to download his statement or log into his online bank account.
The basic premise of ActivePath is simplifying and personalizing the consumer email experience to inspire an underused channel to become a highly used channel, and thereby increase the volume of consumer transactions.
With the loyalty market saturated with players, ActivePath — according to Levy — helps those competing in the space distinguish themselves. In fact, the loyalty market is one that ActivePath hopes to infiltrate. Levy says ActivePath is talking to multiple “daily deal” companies and customer rewards programs for partnership possibilities.
Though improving email within ecommerce is ActivePath’s goal, so too is further infiltrating the retail banking industry.
“The user experience and ability to transact from email is a tremendous channel for banks,” Levy tells Bank Innovation.
Though many banks have given shoutouts to the appeal of account alerts in conversations with me — and our own Bank Innovation Monitor data supports the notion — Levy believes banks are not yet doing an adequate job using email.
“They need to generate more revenue with increased transactions,” says Levy, adding that executing the objective requires making the email experience more interactive, while also cross-selling the consumer in the body of such communications.
Though some players argue “active” email would compete with the online channel, Levy says not only is that not the case, but rather active email serves as an extension of the online channel and offers a communication hub for those consumers who do not roam online. Plus, email is just one part of the puzzle.
“Banks need to be multi-strategy,” Levy says. “It can’t be email or mobile. …Online banking has its place, but it can’t stop there.”