Lloyds Bank is to start sending push notifications about special deals with selected retailers to customers’ smartwatches and smartphones.

The launch of push notifications for the UK bank’s Everyday Offers service – which allows customers to earn up to 15% cashback on purchases made at a range of leading retailers – represents the “first step” towards a broader push notification service the banking group plans to deliver.

The first phase of push notifications will include alerts of when new weekly offers are added to the Everyday Offers service and to let customers know that their cashback has been added to their account. They will also be used to notify customers if one of their transactions has been chosen for It’s On Us, a service that picks 1,000 transactions a week that will be fully reimbursed up to a value of £500.

“One of the things that customers tell us is that they want to hear more from their banks about the things that are most relevant to them to help them manage their money better,” Adrian Bryant, director of digital at Lloyds Bank, told NFC World.

“Push notifications are a natural extension of something we already do today and that we’ve been doing for a number of years. We have text messaging services today so, if I’m a customer, I can receive a text message to tell me whether the cash in my bank, the balance which I have, is below or above a certain amount.

“We know customers really like it. We see increases in customer satisfaction scores and we actually see fewer customers going into their overdraft.”

“The Everyday Offers programme has been live for just over 12 months now,” Bryant continued. “We spoke to customers about four or five months ago in terms of what they thought about the programme. The customers said they love the programme, they love the range of merchants who are in there, but what they did say is that they didn’t always know when they were getting new offers.

“So, this is a service that gives them a little nudge, it lets them know they’ve got new offers. We’ve responded to what our customers have asked us through some of the research that we’ve done and that’s why this will be the first part of our service, but we will do more push notifications in due course and, again, the customers will have a choice as to whether or not they opt in or opt out of those.”

“I think what we’re trying to do at Lloyds Bank is to engage and talk to our customers in a number of different ways,” Bryant added. “I can imagine us, over the coming months or next couple of years, increasing the range of push notifications which will help our customers manage their money better.”