The cohort we weren't measuring.
Monthly activity and redemptions were increasing, but most of the gains came from customers already using the program regularly. When we looked beneath the aggregate, we found the audience the existing strategy was failing to grow.
I led the strategy and relaunch of the bank's consumer loyalty experience across web and mobile, including personalization, lifecycle engagement, and the migration from its legacy rewards program.
We segmented return frequency, repeat redemption, and churn by age, tenure, and redemption behavior. The clearest gap was among younger cardholders, who had more alternatives available through mainland issuers offering broader benefits and stronger digital experiences. The opportunity was to keep serving the program's active audience while giving the next audience a better reason to participate.
The biggest lever was not adding more rewards. It was changing which rewards appeared first.
Everyone could still browse the full catalog. The difference was the homepage. The redesigned experience used several months of transaction history to prioritize offers from a broader catalog that included travel, experiences, and category-specific rewards. Someone whose spending centered on family expenses saw those options first. Someone spending more on dining and travel saw a different starting point.
The program already had the signal. The product change was to use it.
Moving eligible customers from the legacy program introduced a separate trust risk. Enrollment and point conversion depended on card and program rules, and customers moving to the new experience expected their balances to be correct. Finance wanted a fast cutover to close the old program's liability. I argued for a parallel window because any discrepancy would damage trust immediately.
We ran the programs in parallel. It cost more, but it gave us time to validate the conversion logic before completing the transition.
The redesigned program, including transaction-based personalization and lifecycle improvements, helped grow monthly active users from approximately 150,000 to 350,000.
The lesson was simple: aggregate growth can conceal the audience a product still needs to earn.
What this involved
- 150K → 350K monthly active users following the relaunch
- Cohort analysis across return frequency, repeat redemption, age, tenure, and churn
- Transaction-history personalization based on actual spending patterns
- Expanded offering across travel, experiences, and category-specific rewards
- Parallel migration to preserve trust in customer balances