Chinese social networking giant Renren has teamed up with China Merchants Bank in creating a co-branded Renren CMB credit card “with social features.”
The organizations claim that this is a “globally innovative pilot” that combines social, location, and mobile services. Besides offering a range of incentives to card holders, China Merchants Bank will offer useful location based information to users as well, such as useful services offered by more than 10000 of its merchant partners via Renren’s location based services. There will also be check-in features that offer promotions from those partners who are nearby.
The CEO of Renren, Joseph Chen explained that this partnership is an important step for the social network:
Through this co-branded credit card program, we see a business model we previously envisioned start to materialize, combining social, location and mobile services to make people’s lives more convenient, more informed, and more fun.
As for China Merchants Bank, it will greatly benefit from Renren’s young user base, enabling it to bring inmany new customers as a result of incorporating Renren’s social services.
In addition to this partnership with China Merchants Bank, we also recently saw Renren engage in a joint venture with Recruit to offer a social wedding service. These are somewhat unconventional partnerships for a social network, but from a business point of view they appear to make sense.
In a somewhat more natural partnership, Renren also recently announced that it would bring PopCap’s Plants vs Zombies to China through its social network platform.
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