BPE Launches BPE Altruis with Pasteur Institute

BPE, private bank and 100% subsidiary of Crédit Mutuel Arkéa, launches a new banking offer enabling its customers to send funds to the Pasteur Institute. Every card payment superior to 20 euros generates a donation, the amount of which is defined by the customer during the subscription (0.50 euro, 1 or 2 euros). This donation is debited from the contributor’s bank account at the end of the month and provides him with tax benefits (66 or 75% decrease, according to his tax rate). The customer uses a private access on the banking website to check on already paid donations, send additional funds or change the amount sent per purchase.

In order to support this offer BPE launched a cobranded MasterCard card, showing a picture of Louis Pasteur. The customer can however decide to link the Altruis offer to any other card proposed by the private bank. BPE plans to issue 1,000 cards in 2011 (its park includes 20,000 cards in circulation).

Several banking institutions already propose charity cards. In most cases, the customer pays an additional fee when subscribing the card offer and the bank sends a given percentage each time the card is used to make a purchase. Société Générale and BNP Paribas, for instance, adopted this system.

BPE’s offer slightly differs from these other examples. The subscriber is personally committed to help the institute (this structure was successfully initiated by the Crédit Coopératif with its “Agir” cards). BPE’s affinity approach consisted in selecting a field rather familiar to its customers (whose socio-demographic background resembles Pasteur’s contributors) and the bank had to make a double commitment: financial (set charity donation amounts, that do not depend on the commercial success of the card), and operational (BPE network of branches is in charge of selling the cards).

Category : Alertes quotidiennes