The new capability allows businesses to transform data into actions to improve their loyalty schemes. The Portal has already been adopted by Alpha Bank in Greece, which operates 'Alpha Bank Bonus', a successful points-based loyalty coalition.

Leonidas Kassoumis, Senior Manager of Consumer Financing Division of Alpha Bank, said: "The Welcome Analytics Portal helps us to identify opportunities to target promotions both for the bank and our retail partners, encouraging our customers to use their Alpha Bank payment cards more frequently. This helps us achieve a much better level of customer engagement that delivers more transactions for the bank, incremental revenue for our retail partners but more importantly, happy customers."

The Welcome Analytics Portal is a Business Intelligence (BI) tool designed for retail banks running loyalty schemes such as nationwide programmes or local coalitions. This tool is based on the advanced technology powered by Qlikview from Qliktech and enables business users to easily slice, dice and drill down on their data. Welcome's clients can quickly deploy the Welcome Analytics Portal as an add-on to their existing solution.

The tool benefits both retail banks and merchants participating in the loyalty scheme. Both parties can access the data directly related to their business and build better insights into their customers' behaviour through various reports, graphs and tables displaying customers' spending behaviour and engagement. This can then dramatically influence key business decisions.

"Retail banks desperately need tools that allow them to exploit their big data. The Welcome Analytics Portal mixes both payment and loyalty transactions and transforms them into actionable insights for marketing operators. This tool is definitely a must for retail banks that run loyalty coalitions and need BI tools that better serve their loyalty strategy", said Philippe David, CEO of Welcome Real-time.