FNB's eBucks shake-up gets mixed reviews from clients

First National Bank's eBucks rewards programme is well established, and has historically been seen as delivering meaningful value to partners and members alike.

However, this month's sudden changes to the popular loyalty programme have drawn mixed reaction from clients.

Although FNB launched its mid-month 'eBucks PayDay' with great fanfare, not all its customers have welcomed the changes in their entirety.

Long-time FNB client Jono du Bois dissected this new banking landscape with consumer journalist Wendy Knowler.

In summary, he said that ultimately, a programme once designed to reward smart financial behaviour 'now risks penalising customers who don’t take on more products, more debt, or more risk'.

“Maintaining rewards has been narrowed, made more complex, and increasingly tied to taking on additional FNB products - credit, insurance, and investments.”

Here, Knowler cites the example of having to take out car insurance with FNB to get the full discount by getting to a top tier of the programme.

Strictly speaking, signing up for extra products does not qualify as good banking behaviour, she comments.

"It’s called integrating financial services or, more to the point, upselling."

Programme CEO Pieter Woodhatch conceded that introducing a lot of changes at once 'mid-cycle' could be unsettling, and that indeed some people would move down a tier or two.

However, he told Knowler that FNB eBucks has been purposefully evolving over the past18 months to provide 'greater rewards, new products and services and meaningful value' to their customers.

Woodhatchsaid FNB was set on investing more in eBucks than ever before.

The bottom line is that while the revised eBucks programme does potentially have better benefits, you need to buy into their ecosystem to a greater extent to get to the top tiers where the benefits are extremely nice-to-have, is Knowler's conclusion.

"Loyalty rewards are not a right, but in SA they have largely moved from a nice-to-have to savings which for many people mean the difference between making it to payday or not. It will be interesting to see how these changes are received by FNB clients when the dust settles and they’ve had time to figure out how to navigate the complex landscape."

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