Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Kelly Passey, EVP of Business and Product Development at Access Development (Part 1)

Kelly Passey is the executive vice president of business and product development at Access Development, a company that manages one of America’s largest discount and rewards networks. Kelly has more than 20 years of experience as an executive, having worked for Fidelity Investments and Visa USA previously. In this interview he talks about Access’s incentive system, provides interesting use cases of how merchants and consumers benefit from this system, and discusses trends within the industry.

Sramana Mitra: Kelly, let’s familiarize our audience with both yourself and the company.

Kelly Passey: My name is Kelly Passey. I have been with Access Development for about eight years and for 20 years I have been in financial services related support – a lot around incentives, loyalty, rewards, etc. In my eight years here at Access I have been about four years on the rewards and loyalty division and another four years running product and business development. Prior to that I was with Visa in San Francisco for more than seven years, mostly helping them manage their offer management division. Prior to that I was with another financial services layer. My first five years were with Fidelity Investments.

SM: Talk about Access a bit.

KP: Access Development is a 29-year-old company founded in 1984. It is privately held with about 140 employees to date and headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. We specialize in bringing value to end consumers through merchant networks. For 28 years we have been working with large and small merchants and retailers from the local franchise owner. It may still be a national brand, but a franchise ownership group. The company would use this as a promotional advertising channel. We secure offers and deals from the merchants and then take that out to corporate America, where we are a B2B shop, and then give that value to their end constituency group – whether that is an employee, a member of a certain group, a cardholder of a bank or something else. We help them deliver that value in that circle.

SM: Let’s do some examples of what exactly you do. You can pick whatever B2B scenario you want to.

KP: We work to support Allstate. Allstate has a membership group through the Allstate Motor Club, similar to AAA, where they have an x number of members across the U.S. Those members pay Allstate a membership fee for benefits. But I may go the whole year, for example, and maybe I only have one instance where I really need to leverage that. I get a flat tire, for example, and that is where I leverage that. But the other 12 months of the year, Allstate wants to deliver value to their customers. In that model Allstate has worked with us, where we took those merchant relationships that I mentioned. Those merchants are bringing offers and deals up to 50% off to the table. This is a B2B relationship where we are the partner behind the scenes, Allstate brands and customizes it how they want to and through web, email and mobile presentment they can provide valuable offers and deals at hundreds of thousands of places, where they can shop and save. So the opportunity for them is to help their members save money day in and day out while they still have the underlying benefits of the Allstate Motor Club.

SM: Give us some examples of the kinds of merchants you bring into an Allstate relationship.

KP: We basically contract with merchants – large and small – from a franchise owner Dunkin’ Donuts, Pizza Hut or Quiznos to a large national merchant like New York & Company or Macy’s. It is really client dependent. Allstate can select based on their customer demographic, whichever they believe will be the most relevant set of merchant offers. Many of our clients, like Allstate, will pick for example dining and food merchants, and they want entertainment merchants like Blockbuster and Disney World. They want hotel merchants like Starwood Hotels. They can customize the relevance based on what they know about their customer group and therefore, on our side, we are only leveraging that set of content that is most meaningful for driving the loyalty they are trying to accomplish.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Interview with Kelly Passey, EVP of Business and Product Development at Access Development
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