Discovery Bank Active Rewards need rethinking.

The Discovery Bank Active Rewards benefit was poorly thought through. Previously, the Discovery Miles benefit was easy to understand for consumers and was well liked as people could understand the direct relationship between their spend and how many Discovery Miles they received.

The new active rewards are nothing short of a disaster. To achieve your weekly goal you need to accumulate points. If you spend between R20-R49, you get half a point. Between R50-R499, 1 point. Between R500 and R2499, 2 points and so on. So if your target is 25 points for the week, assuming your average transaction is between R50-R499, you need to make 3.5 transactions per day. A sense check will tell you that this is unrealistic. So for customers that have activated their iPhone benefit and need to reach their weekly goals what can they do? The logical step would be to break up your food purchases at Woolies into multiple purchases. Why spend R1000 in one go? Rather ask the cashier to ring up items in R50 increments to maximise your Discovery rewards. It seems stupid and it is because the way the reward program was designed is silly.

When bank clients realise this and see how difficult the iPhone benefit is to achieve, I'm sure there will be many disgruntled bank customers. This is merely my opinion and I believe Discovery should urgently address the design of the weekly rewards to take into account total rand value of spend rather than number of transactions. If not, I fear that the bank, which started off as a very promising idea for Discovery could end up being a huge failure.

Feel free to get in touch if you'd like to discuss this further.