CNME Editor Mark Forker sat down with David Ashford, Chief Product Officer at mimojo, to find out how the revolutionary cashback rewards app is redefining how merchants across the UAE deliver customer loyalty.
David Ashford is a serial entrepreneur, and one of the most respected technology leaders in the e-business space across the Middle East region.
Ashford has enjoyed a stellar professional career in digital product and tech to date, one that began back in the United Kingdom 35 years ago, when he worked for a management information and billing company, before becoming Head of Information Systems at Publicis.
He went on to work as an e-business consultant for a private equity firm, as well as co-founding several startups and investing in others. He relocated to Abu Dhabi in 2009, when he was appointed the General Manager of AppsArabia.
Ashford’s most notable role was CIO at The Entertainer. He joined the company in 2012, and was one of the key figures in driving their astounding success and growth, before leaving in 2020.
Whilst The Entertainer’s star has waned somewhat, Ashford is now the driving force behind mimojo, branded as a reward and loyalty technology company that is delivering seamless experiences for both consumers and merchants.
Ashford began our conversation by detailing the factors that drove the inception of mimojo.
The starting point was to determine the major pain points facing both consumers and merchants when it came to the loyalty and rewards space in the UAE.
“We directly engaged with consumers and merchants, and asked them what problems they faced when it came to the current rewards and incentives programmes in the market. The single biggest challenge, from a merchant perspective, was lack of flexibility. Merchants told us they wanted to be able to choose what type of offer they were going to fund, and to choose the tenure of their commitment against that offer. They told us they wanted to choose different offers for peak and off-peak, to be able to increase the richness of their offer when they had spare capacity. The redemption process was another heavily vocalised friction point, due to the amount of staff training required for one programme to the next,” said Ashford.
It’s been well documented that we live in a digital world, labelled by many as the ‘experience economy’. However, Ashford explains the ‘experience’ for the majority of consumers, when it came to rewards and loyalty programmes, on the market left a lot to be desired.
“The key pain point that consistently arose during our consumer research was the redemption process. Consumers detest the arduous, socially awkward and cumbersome processes that loyalty programmes have in place. In addition, consumers were frustrated that in a digital world where everything is automated, loyalty is still completely manual, meaning often consumers ‘forget’ to make their redemption and miss out on the reward or saving. Another key point for consumers, which also aligned with merchants, was flexibility. Consumers took issue with programmes that don’t offer flexibility around their spending habits and frequency. These were the key insights that drove the creation of the mimojo product you see today,” said Ashford.
Ashford believes that mimojo has developed a product that can not only alleviate these pain points, but actually eradicate them.
The key technology mimojo is using to drive their application is not something new, in fact, it’s a technology that has been around for decades. And no, it’s not AI, it’s card-linked technology.
Ashford explained card-linked technology in more detail, and outlined how some merchants were using the card-linked technology in the UAE, but were doing it in a way that created a lot of friction for consumers.
“Card linked technology is not new, it’s a product built by the card schemes, Visa and Mastercard, that has been around for decades. It is widely used in Europe and North America, but is relatively new to the Middle East region. A handful of businesses are using card-linked technology locally, but they are using it very differently to us. For example, they use the transaction to reward points, and then the customer has to confirm when they want to change those points into a currency, or stored value, and then burn their rewards as part payment within a closed network – still creating friction. We set out to build something that was completely frictionless, so there’s no need for the consumer to do anything,” said Ashford.
Ashford then outlined how the mimojo programme actually functions, and how the entire value chain proposition works from both a merchant and consumer perspective.
“Our onboarding process with merchants sees us agree the commercial offer they want to fund, and then we enrol their outlet information with Visa and Mastercard. Consumers then download our app and enrol their credit and debit cards. And that’s it! The consumer then automatically earns cashback when they pay with their enrolled Visa or Mastercard cards in any of our enrolled outlets. You simply pay in the normal way – Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, Google Pay, or with your physical card. You’ll get a near-real-time push notification when you’ve earned cashback – often this is a delightful surprise for people. mimojo accumulates all cashback earned, and then on the 15th of every month, which we call mimojo payday, we deposit all your cashback as cold hard cash onto your card. The steps really are that simple; download, enrol your cards and then go and live your life! You’ll be delighted to earn cashback in places you didn’t know and you’ll never miss out on an opportunity to earn cashback. But really what we want people to do, and this is part of our value proposition to merchants, is we want people to use our app to discover where they can earn cashback and to change their behaviours as a result,” said Ashford.
Despite its relative infancy as a company, mimojo has enjoyed a lot of success, and that’s evidenced by the impressive portfolio of brands on the app.
mimojo boasts businesses ranging from laundrettes to florists, to ride-hailing services to Zofeur, the safe driver app, and much, much more. But again, as Ashford reiterates, they are in the business of influencing consumers to choose mimojo merchant partners over any other.
“For example, Dubai residents have a wide choice, and use a wide selection of laundry collection services. mimojo members have the incentive of automatic cashback from our participating laundry collection services, to actively influence their choice. mimojo members can earn significantly lucrative cashback, be it through high frequency usage with merchants like Zofeur, a safe driver app, or through some of our high value purchase merchants. A mimojo member saved over AED 1,000 in cashback on one transaction because he had to get his car fixed up, including a new battery and four new tyres. Someone else earned over AED 800 cashback when buying a top-end bicycle. You can literally earn cashback on everything imaginable with mimojo – and it’s this automatic cashback proposition which will drive addictive loyalty and behaviour change,” said Ashford.
The CPO at mimojo, conceded that they faced two challenges.
“The first challenge we face is to attract more consumers, and obviously it’s a marketplace, so the more consumers we have the easier it is to get better merchants; and the better merchants we have then the easier it is to get more consumers. The second challenge we have is to inform the consumers about the great merchant partners that we have – ‘choose these guys and you’ll earn significant cashback, effortlessly’,” said Ashford.
Ashford said the company’s ‘sweet spot’ was undoubtedly e-commerce.
“Our sweet spot at mimojo is e-commerce because, when you think about it, whenever you’ve used another programme, no matter what that programme it is, there is always a redemption process of some sort. And in e-commerce, that’s difficult. At mimojo, there’s no special affiliate link or promo code, there’s no need for any of that. You can go directly to their website, or through Google, or from our app… you pay and you earn instant cashback, it’s really that simple. When your payment is successful, you’ll immediately receive a push notification from mimojo informing you that you’ve just earned cashback. Everybody is telling us that this all sounds too good to be true,” said Ashford.
Ashford stressed that a major problem is that some merchants don’t understand card-linked technology.
“We explain to merchants that our project is powered by card-linked, and we’re frequently hit with the response ‘what’s that?’. Our sales pitch to merchants starts with that educational piece on the technology itself. Once merchants understand the frictionless experience, they immediately see and value the benefits it brings. For example, the technology means that there is no front of house staff training required, which frees up service time. But the frictionless commitment doesn’t stop at the technology, as part of our commercial infrastructure, we extend flexibility on tenure and merchants can manage varying cashback value for on-peak vs. off-peak hours. To support our merchants looking to increase Average Transaction Value, we introduced tiered offers; for example, consumers receive 10% cashback below a certain spending threshold, and then the cashback jumps to 20% cashback when they spend over that threshold. There are so many benefits, and it’s a no-brainer in all reality,” said Ashford.
Banks often fund offers themselves but these are of course less generous and are capped. Because these offers are not funded by the merchant, the customer benefits from a double whammy: they get some cashback from their card issuer as well as uncapped automatic cashback from mimojo.
One of the more overused terms of the last decade has been the declaration that ‘data is the new oil’ but, whilst that terms has become somewhat tedious, the truth still rings true that data is so important in relation to empowering businesses to make better decisions in a much faster fashion.
“We’re driving footfall to our merchant partners, and we’re giving them access to unprecedented data, and easy-to-digest visualisations of that data, so they can learn more about their customers and start to understand their business trends,” said Ashford.
Ashford said that mimojo will never give PII (Personal Identity Information) data to the merchants, as that’s a data protection right that all consumers have. However, they do give a merchant information on customer demographics and patterns in relation to spending behaviours.
However, like we hear across so many industries, having the data is one thing, but ensuring you have the talent to decipher and apply the technology is another.
One way that mimojo tries to plug that hole for their merchants is through their own data portal.
“There is a wide variety of data analysis skillsets out there, and a varying appetite to explore and apply data insights; some merchants embrace it, some merchants struggle with it. We bridge this gap for our merchants through our data portal. Merchants can review their transactions real-time in the portal via desktop or a purpose built app, which removes the admin for them later in the process. mimojo user transactions appear instantly on their personalised dashboard, and each merchant has 14 days to accept or decline each transaction. A scenario where a merchant may decline an offer would be if another offer has already been redeemed by that user; that could be a meal deal, happy hour or a competitor offer. If merchants don’t decline a transaction within 14 days, then it’s automatically approved.” said Ashford.
Another key differentiator for mimojo is the fact that merchants can deal directly with dedicated account managers, who can help them to understand datasets and make recommendations that can drive more traffic and revenue.
Ashford also pointed out that in the future the company will incorporate AI into its consumer app and its merchant portal, especially when it comes to recommending actionable insights.
Ashford concluded a brilliantly fascinating insight into mimojo, by outlining the payment model adopted by the revolutionary cashback app.
“We offer the merchants that we onboard some flexibility in payment options: float, card-on-file, and direct debit. The key is for us to be cashflow positive – this benefits our merchant partners as well as us because we can focus on adding value to our merchants instead of chasing cash.”
“Our primary focus at the moment us is to establish our core ecosystem; onboard more merchants and acquire more consumers. From there, the mimojo magic kicks into action; we educate and influence our consumers to proactively choose products and services from our participating merchants, creating incremental revenue for the merchant and delivering uncapped seamless cashback for the consumer,” concluded Ashford.
mimojo is just at the start of their journey, but it’s hard to see the company not having huge success, and with the experienced Ashford providing a safe pair of hands, it’s only a matter of time before mimojo becomes a household name in Dubai, and across the UAE.
