What Every Australian Loyalty Program Get Wrong, And How Litecard Fix It

How Brian Pham did it: What Every Australian Loyalty Program Get Wrong, And How Litecard Fix It

Brian Pham is the CEO and founder of Litecard. Born and raised in Australia, he did university mostly in Australia and worked a number of corporate and consulting jobs before starting his own venture. Around three years ago he got a gut feeling about an idea and decided it was something he wanted to dedicate a big portion of his life to — potentially his life's work. That idea became Litecard, what he calls a "wallet led marketing platform" — wallet meaning Apple and Google Wallet, the thing people use every day for bank cards and boarding passes. Brian found it was an amazing opportunity for brands and retailers to use the wallet as a media channel.

The pitch starts from a problem brands and retailers have with media and marketing: it's tough to reach an end customer. SMS reads as spam and many countries don't send SMS for marketing; email no longer lands in your inbox, it goes to the promotions tab; and social channels like YouTube, Google and Facebook are becoming more expensive by design. Brian's view is that a brand or retailer "would definitely have a problem in the next 10 or 20 years around where to spend your media to acquire and retain a customer." His insight was that brands often don't execute their own strategy — the agencies do. So Litecard built a platform made for agencies as well as the brand groups themselves.

That agency channel is how Litecard scaled. The first real media agency relationship came through North Face: when they went live in Australia, North Face required Litecard to work with their external media agency in South Australia. Brian's team set out to compress the workflow — "out of 100 clicks, ten clicks" — and that shaped how they work with every agency since. Some agencies are very technical and do the integration themselves; some are media-strategy focused and just want the tools; some want both. The early objection was that putting a product into the mobile wallet for advertising needed too much coding and technical integration. So Litecard kept evolving the product until it required almost none. Now, Brian says, a brand like L'Oréal, Mars or Jack Daniels can buy a hundred thousand barcodes, drop them into the platform, customise the whole journey, and a customer can click a social ad, add it to their wallet and scan in-store — a process that takes about 1 to 2 minutes with no integrations.

Brian studies how platforms like Microsoft Word and Gmail won critical mass: they were easy. He sees the same opening in mobile wallets. Walk into JB Hi-Fi and you have no idea how many points or vouchers you have or when they expire unless you download an app, log in, or dig through email — and apps are expensive to build and manage. Litecard's bet is that customers want a better way to experience a brand and are being lost because there isn't one. To decide where to expand, the team ran deep analytics across the world after 12 to 18 months in market, segmenting customers by brand and retail sub-segments and feeding messaging costs (SMS, email, push) per region into an algorithm — looking for regions where Google and Apple Wallet were already available with users present. Australia, Brian argues, is the perfect testing ground: it's a release point for US and UK companies, Apple and Google Wallet ship there shortly after the US, and it's a crowded market — 30, 40, 50 point-of-sale companies versus fewer than ten in a US market with ten times the population. Win there and you likely have a strong chance globally.

The expansion wasn't all smooth. The Philippines looked like a perfect fit — everyone said so, and shopping habits there resemble America's — but the team didn't know where to start, until someone in their network introduced them to a brand family that owns the distribution rights of over 100 brands plus its own marketing agency, and they formed an alliance. Litecard opened its first European office in Amsterdam because partners and customers were already there and the region was too large to serve remotely across Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany, Spain and Italy. Asked what he'd do differently, Brian says he'd study the data faster — he gets excited about technology and figures out the data after, and reckons asking "where am I solving a problem, how big is the problem, is it global?" at the very start could have sped things up two or three times. The best advice he ever got came from an Apple executive after 6 to 12 months of email and LinkedIn: "never go to sleep curious."

What you'll hear

• The wallet as a media channel — why Brian thinks Apple and Google Wallet are an amazing opportunity for brands and retailers, not just a place for bank cards and boarding passes
• Selling through agencies, not just brands — how North Face forcing Litecard to work with their media agency turned into the default go-to-market motion
• Killing technical friction — how the product evolved from "too much coding" objections to a 1-to-2-minute, no-integration flow
• How to pick a market — the deep analytics, data segments and messaging-cost algorithm Litecard used to decide where to expand
• Why Australia is the testing ground — release point for US and UK companies, early Apple and Google Wallet access, and a crowded market that proves you out
• The Philippines surprise — a market everyone called perfect that they couldn't crack until a brand-family alliance opened the door
• Never go to sleep curious — the one piece of advice an Apple executive gave Brian that stuck

Key claims from this episode

Quotes from this episode

Themes Brian returns to

• Wallet as the next media channel — as SMS and email saturate and social gets more expensive, Brian sees the mobile wallet as the new generation of personalized marketing
• Sell to whoever executes the strategy — brands often don't run their own marketing, so Litecard built for the agencies that do
• Remove friction to win critical mass — like Microsoft Word and Gmail before it, the product wins by being easy and requiring no coding
• Let the data pick the market — deep analytics, data segments and an algorithm, not gut feel, decide where Litecard expands
• Australia as proving ground — a crowded, forward-thinking market that, once won, signals a strong chance everywhere else
• Study the data faster — Brian's main regret is getting excited about the technology before asking how big and how global the problem is