AmEx To Beef up Marketing for Serve in Wake of Promising Pilot Results

American Express Co. will step up marketing of its Serve digital payment system early in the third quarter, following encouraging results from a pilot in Eugene, Ore., says David Messenger, executive vice president of online and mobile, American Express.

“We’ve done a market test in Eugene and got some great initial feedback there,” he says, declining to give details. “We’ll be rolling out broader marketing approaches shortly.”

As part of the initial rollout, AmEx primarily is focusing on marketing Serve through partnerships with other companies. It has already announced partnerships with Ticketmaster LLC, Concur Technologies Inc., a provider of online expense-management services for businesses, and Flipswap Inc., which facilitates trade-ins of used cell phones. Ticketmaster will offer Serve as a platform for customers to make and collect payments towards ticket purchases from other customers.

“Ticketmaster’s a great one where embedding Serve’s capabilities within Ticketmaster’s platform will allow someone to buy a group of tickets for a concert and actually get the money from their friends for those tickets in a very seamless, effective way,” Messenger says. “An example like that we think will really start to raise awareness in the market of what Serve can do.”

He adds that AmEx also is in “active discussions” with other major partners.

While partnerships will be the major focus for driving growth, AmEx also plans to do direct consumer marketing, mainly digital marketing through social networks such as Facebook, Messenger says.

“We’ve had some great response to some of our online and more viral marketing approaches in Eugene so the bias will be towards that rather than traditional media,” he says.

AmEx in March launched Serve, a multifaceted online and offline payment system centered on a digital account and reloadable prepaid card that enables person-to-person payments as well as physical, online, and mobile purchases. The Serve digital account is funding-agnostic, meaning it can receive funds from any credit or debit card or through the automated clearinghouse network.

Serve is built on the Revolution Money platform that AmEx bought early last year.

AmEx also will shortly begin signing up new Serve merchants, Messenger says. Serve already can be used at any merchant accepting AmEx products.

However, early market testing indicates that using Serve for person-to-person payments “really resonates” with consumers, Messenger says.

“It isn’t only younger demographics who actually want to be able to send money back and forth to friends and to people they shared a meal with or they split the rent with,” he says. “There’s a lot of untapped demand out there for really good P2P functionality.”

Serve is stepping up its marketing just as mega banks Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., and Wells Fargo & Co. announced a joint P2P service named clearXchange. While clearXchange currently is limited to customers of the the three banks, it could be integrated with other P2P systems and possibly become a payment option for merchants. Serve also is up against a tide of new digital wallets, the most recent of which is Google Wallet, introduced last week by the Web search giant as well as a host of partners, including MasterCard Inc., Citigroup Inc., and First Data Corp.