Cielo Premia, which uses Welcome XLS technology, is a tool for managing promotions at the point of sale and is offered exclusively to Cielo's merchants. To date, the technology has been deployed and used in more than 13,000 different marketing and loyalty campaigns.

Welcome Real-time's technology allows Cielo's customers to provide a rewarding payments experience for cardholders. Shoppers at participating merchants benefit from receiving instant promotions, including real-time discounts and e-coupons when using their cards at the point of sale. Thanks to the scheme's flexibility, these promotions can be redeemed both at the participating merchant, or at other participating retailers, enabling cross-merchant campaigns.

Using the Cielo Premia scheme, merchants are able to create marketing campaigns via an easy-to-use platform. These campaigns can be tailored to target specific customer segments to drive sales of a certain product, encourage repeat visits or motivate shoppers to use a specific payment method. Banks, partners and card associations also see the benefits of the tool and use it as a way to engage cardholders and merchants, since both benefit from the state of the art ability to manage and deploy targeted promotions.

Eduardo Chedid, Cielo's Executive Vice President of Products and Business, said, "Cielo's strategy is to bring more value each day for our merchants; we strongly believe that by helping them to sell more and to improve their own customer experience we build a relationship that is larger than just being a payments technology provider. Cielo Premia fits perfectly in that strategy as we are the first ones to offer to our network of merchants the ability to design and implement different types of campaigns, rewards and discounts that suit the needs of each business model differently. The beauty of it is that everything is done electronically and the merchants can monitor and analyse the campaigns with minimum effort."

Philippe David, CEO of Welcome Real-time said, "Deploying this technology makes Cielo the first payments network in Brazil to allow merchants to offer promotions to cardholders in real time at the point of sale. We are excited to be part of this groundbreaking project with Cielo to successfully introduce the first real-time loyalty programmes in this market."

The Welcome XLS platform is used by Welcome Real-time's customers in over 20 countries worldwide. The technology enables banks and retailers to implement loyalty programmes which allow the customer to earn and redeem rewards in real-time via multiple channels including ATMs, online and at the point of sale. The technology also allows banks and retailers to target specific consumer segments based on their spending behaviour and also allows the organisations to generate reports to analyse the success of the programme.