Elo | A Pareteum Wi-Fi Success Story

Elo’s Evolution

Back in 2011, the first wholly Brazilian credit card brand, Elo, was launched as a partnership between three of Brazil’s largest banks – Banco do Brasil, Bradesco, and CAIXA. To give you an idea of the magnitude of this partnership and the scope of their market share, these three banks together represent nearly three-quarters of all banking accounts in the country.

Backed by that sort of financial clout, it should come as no surprise that Elo’s domestic market share grew rapidly. Their cards, in particular, were exceptionally popular.

Nevertheless, even with that measure of success, Elo hadn’t yet broken out beyond the borders of Brazil. That was about to change.

In 2015, Elo entered into an agreement with Discover Financial Services, which made it possible for Elo cardholders to make international purchases and withdraw cash on Discover’s network.

A year later, Elo conducted its first international transaction on the Discover Global Network, marking the official, international acceptance of Elo’s cards.

Elo’s Customer Loyalty Challenge

Now, amid Elo’s extraordinary trajectory, they faced a challenge. While their market position was improving expeditiously, Elo sought to enhance customer loyalty while delivering a best-in-class benefits package based on the following three company pillars:

1. Innovation. Deliver a first-in-market benefit that would add value to customers.
2. International acceptance. Help Elo become the first Brazilian card brand to achieve international acceptance.
3. High-income cards. Meet the needs of high-end, high-flying consumers of Elo’s high-income cards, Elo Mais, Grafite, and Nanquim.

With these pillars in mind, Elo made an educated guess: In mobile-mad Brazil, cardholders would value Wi-Fi highest among all other benefits.

To test their assumption, Elo conducted a survey of cardholders, listing Wi-Fi among other potential benefits. When the results came in, they confirmed that Wi-Fi ranked as the most valuable benefit across all three premium cardholders.

Finding a Partner

Their minds made up; Elo now needed a partner. One strategic and flexible enough to bring high-quality connectivity to Elo’s high-end customer base.

For this, Elo turned to Pareteum, a global, mobile connectivity company that has created and operates the world’s largest aggregated Wi-Fi network.

Elo Wi-Fi: A New Benefit for Elo’s High-end Cardholders

Implementation and Customization

Once the two companies made the partnership official, it was time for Elo and Pareteum to get to work customizing the new benefit for Brazilian app users who value constant improvements to their service experience.

Elo knew that Brazilian users would prefer a lightweight app, so Elo and Pareteum worked to reduce the size of the app to meet the requirements of Elo customers.

Features and Benefits

Upon deployment, the Elo Wi-Fi app gave users the following features and benefits:

• Access to the world’s largest Wi-Fi network, including strong domestic coverage in Brazil
• Security and privacy
• Lightweight
• Easy to activate
• Fully integrated with Pareteum
• In-language customer support via email and social media channels

Results

The result of this hard work – the Elo Wi-Fi mobile app – has been a resounding success. Fully integrated into the Pareteum platform, Elo Wi-Fi saw 17,000 enrollees in short order. Since the launch, the number of enrollees has bloomed to well over 100,000, with daily usage in over 100 countries across the globe, as well as inflight. Most importantly, praise from their cardholders has been uniform:

•  “Attractive and intuitive app.”
• “I think it is highly useful and user-friendly.”
• “Elo Wi-Fi connection is a positive customer experience.”

Still, the story is not done. Elo has been so impressed with the partnership that they’re looking for new ways to work with Pareteum to maintain their market edge in innovation. For example, Elo is considering leveraging Pareteum’s “Engage” feature to facilitate location-based marketing. Furthermore, they’re looking into Pareteum Location Intelligence Data to provide fraud analysis, fraud prevention, and other benefits.