Bond Brand Loyalty securely improves performance, accelerates client onboarding by 20 percent using Microsoft Azure

Bond Brand Loyalty (Bond) processes a massive amount of data to deliver seamless customer journeys that build relationships between brands and customers, and it needed a way to scale cost-effectively to facilitate rapid growth. The company manages loyalty rewards programs with more than 100 million members in sectors including retail, financial services, and mobility. It migrated its systems from an on-premises infrastructure to Microsoft Azure in 2019 to achieve greater scale. “Now we can tap into available Azure services and scale our infrastructure more efficiently, which is critical for our clients who rely on our technology to support their revenue objectives,” says Maria Pallante, Executive Vice President of Technology Solutions at Bond.

Re-platforming Synapze LX into the cloud was just the beginning for Bond. The company built a modern infrastructure that uses a host of Microsoft solutions to deliver advanced analytics and unlock AI. “We’re continuing to evolve, and we value the collaboration with Microsoft as we tackle different scenarios and use cases together,” says Pallante.

Deriving insights from petabytes of data with Azure to drive value for clients

Bond generates growth for its clients by using intelligent connections and engaging experiences to nurture enduring relationships between people and brands. With clients bringing millions of customer accounts and billions of transactions to Bond, it’s critical that Bond’s Synapze LX technology scales and protects personal data, such as phone numbers, birthdays, and emails. For example, Bond’s Synapze LX technology regularly manages more than 3,000 application programming interface (API) calls per second, with spikes around days like Black Friday far exceeding that number.

The company has built its solutions on Microsoft technology for decades. “We’ve always been a Microsoft shop,” says Pallante. “We built our proprietary technology on the Microsoft stack, and we wanted to unlock scale and benefit from Microsoft’s investments in security by migrating to Azure.” After the migration, Bond worked with Microsoft to build a new offering with advanced analytics capabilities.

All the behind-the-scenes work on Bond’s technology translates into powering compelling customer journeys for clients. For example, loyalty program members of a global specialty retailer with physical and online presence receive regular newsletters and personalized content, such as birthday and welcome offers. “When people enroll, Bond’s technology manages all the points issuance, the rewards issuance, and offer redemptions,” says Pallante.

Accelerating client onboarding by 20 percent on Azure to support a growing client base

On Azure, Bond built a modern offering that supports extensive security configurations so that employees and partners can truly collaborate on challenging engineering and data-science problems. That approach has reduced onboarding time for new clients by 20 percent, resulting in strong customer satisfaction scores. “We’re very proud of the technology that we’ve built on Azure,” says Pallante.

Bond used a host of Microsoft offerings to create its solution. Bond visually integrates data sources with Azure Data Factory. It then delivers integrated data to Azure Synapse Analytics to unlock business insights. To offer personalization, Bond also builds, deploys, and manages high-quality models using Azure Machine Learning. “Several hundred of our 800 employees are focused on analytics, which is an important part of our business and how we service clients,” says Pallante.

Collaboration has been key to Bond’s use of Azure. “We’ve really appreciated the close relationship with Microsoft,” says Pallante. “We’re both looking at what’s next, and Microsoft has asked for our input into the constant evolution of its technology.” When it has specific needs, Bond works with Microsoft to meet them. Then, Bond uses solutions such as Azure Cosmos DB to develop high-performance offerings to support real-time customer interactions for our clients.

Security is critical for Bond because it handles personal information on behalf of clients. “Microsoft security features around identity and authentication are supreme,” says Pallante. “We’ve benefited from these offerings, which continue to evolve.”

Though its teams are busy rolling out new features, Bond remains focused on driving value for its clients. “We’re never going to innovate for innovation’s sake,” says Pallante. “We’re going to innovate in a manner that drives the right use cases and business outcomes for our clients, and Microsoft is a great collaborator from that perspective.”

Using AI to continually optimize Bond’s systems

Bond is eager to continue refining its systems now that it has a scalable, high-performance offering in place. “We need to always make sure that solutions we implement are supporting our clients’ growth objectives in a cost-effective manner, and we need to continually optimize that,” says Pallante. “Microsoft is aware of that.”

Looking ahead, Bond is planning to introduce tools that enhance the impact of the systems it already has. “We’re excited about the continued infusion of AI into our technology using the solutions that Microsoft is making available,” says Pallante.