# Why do card offer catalogues go stale, and what does it cost a bank?

Card offer catalogues go stale because offers have a short life and nobody is paid to notice when one ends. Merchants let deals expire, close branches, change terms or train new staff who have never heard of the discount. The bank's app keeps showing the offer anyway. The cost lands when a cardholder presents the card, is refused, and files a complaint against the bank. The fix is operational: named ownership, weekly verification, regular mystery shopping and automatic expiry dates on every offer.

By Muhammad Ali Khoja, CSO. Published 2026-10-19.

## How does an offer go from live to wrong?

Four things happen, usually without anyone telling the bank. The campaign reaches its end date and the merchant stops honouring it. A branch closes or moves, and the app still shows the old address. The merchant changes the terms, perhaps from 20% to 10%, or adds a minimum spend. Or the merchant stays willing but the cashier on shift was hired last month and has no idea the offer exists. In each case the catalogue entry looks fine on screen and fails at the till.

## Why does nobody catch it?

Because accuracy has no owner. The alliance team negotiated the offer and moved on to the next one. The marketing team published it. The app team maintains the screen, not the content. The merchant has no reason to call the bank when a deal ends. With a catalogue of several hundred entries and no scheduled check, the share of broken offers rises every month until a customer complaint forces a cleanup.

## What does a stale offer cost the bank?

The cardholder does not blame the restaurant. They chose that restaurant because the bank's app promised a discount, and the bank is who they call. A refused offer turns a loyalty benefit into a complaint, a call-centre ticket and a reason to use another card next time. The cost is not the discount value. It is the trust in every other offer in the catalogue, because a cardholder who has been refused once will stop trusting the list.

## What does an accurate catalogue need?

| Practice | What it does |
| --- | --- |
| Named ownership | One person or team is accountable for the accuracy of every live offer |
| Weekly verification | Scheduled calls or checks with merchants to confirm offers, branches and terms |
| Mystery shopping | Real visits with real cards to test whether staff honour the offer |
| Automatic expiry | Every offer carries an end date and disappears from every channel when it passes |
| Redemption data | Real-time redemption counts flag offers that have quietly stopped working |

## How does a managed merchant alliance handle this?

FetchSky's merchant alliance services run discount and perk programmes for banks, insurers, telcos and payment schemes under the client's brand. The network covers 5,000+ merchants in 50+ cities and serves 5 million+ cards, built over ten years of running alliances. A dedicated alliance team negotiates the offers, regular mystery shopping tests them, and discounts are configured by card BIN with caps and limits per campaign and real-time redemption data. A call centre and ticketing desk handles cardholders and merchants, so a refused offer reaches someone who can fix it the same day. The full picture of how alliances and loyalty fit together is in the [merchant alliances and loyalty guide](/insights/merchant-alliances-and-loyalty-guide).

## What should a Head of Cards do this quarter?

Pull the catalogue and count the offers with no end date. Pick 30 at random and call the merchants. The share that fail is the share of the catalogue currently working against the bank. Then assign ownership, set a weekly verification cadence and add expiry dates before the next campaign goes live. The alternative is to hand the whole operation to a team that already does this for a living, through [merchant alliance services](/services/merchant-alliance-services).

To see how a managed programme keeps a catalogue accurate, start with [merchant alliance services](/services/merchant-alliance-services).

## Read next

- [Merchant alliances and loyalty programmes: the complete guide](https://fetchsky.com/insights/merchant-alliances-and-loyalty-guide)
- [Merchant alliance services](https://fetchsky.com/services/merchant-alliance-services)
- [What is a merchant alliance programme?](https://fetchsky.com/insights/what-is-a-merchant-alliance-programme)

Source: https://fetchsky.com/insights/why-card-offer-catalogues-go-stale