Financial services · Consumer web
The complete website for Citi Private Pass, Citi's cardholder benefits programme — presale concert and event offers plus dining and lifestyle benefits, a custom CMS for the marketing team to curate them, and a live event feed to keep the catalogue current.
Citi's marketing team could curate and publish cardholder benefits by city and state on their own schedule, and cardholders got a site that worked properly on their phone years before that was standard for a bank.
// the problem
Citi wanted cardholders to find and use their Private Pass benefits — presale concert and event offers, plus dining and lifestyle perks — on a site that a marketing team could keep current city by city, without asking engineering for every change, and that worked on whatever device a cardholder happened to be holding.
// engineering
This launched in 2012, when most banks were still shipping a separate m-dot site for mobile. Private Pass was built responsive from the start — a mobile-first stylesheet with three breakpoints and an iOS-specific sheet for the quirks Safari needed handled on its own — so cardholders got one site that adapted, not a stripped-down fallback.
Cardholders searched and filtered by city, artist and category, with autosuggest and faceted refinement, merchandising sliders and featured boxes to surface what mattered, and video testimonials alongside the offers. Email capture handled both subscribing and unsubscribing cleanly, as a bank's marketing programme requires.
The programme's marketing team curated which offers appeared in which slot, per city and per state, with drag ordering, a geographic and category taxonomy, and an audit log of who changed what. An XML feed published approved content out to the live site, so publishing a change never meant a deploy.
An automated feed ingested live-event listings and artwork from a major ticketing source, so new presales and events appeared without anyone re-keying them by hand.
// result
A responsive site — mobile-first with three breakpoints and an iOS-specific stylesheet, in 2012 — carrying Citi's Private Pass programme: browsable, searchable presale and lifestyle offers; a marketing-owned CMS publishing curated content per city and state through an XML feed; and an automated feed keeping the event catalogue current against a major ticketing source.
Citi has confirmed this engagement and the use of the Private Pass name; it also appears on our client list. Everything else in this case reflects what we know from the archived build — no traffic, cardholder or conversion figures are claimed here because we don’t have them.
Content publishing pipeline · XML feed integration · Automated data ingestion · Relational database · Frontend application layer
Tell us what you're building. You'll leave with an honest opinion, even if it's "you don't need us."
Reference calls with past clients are available under NDA during evaluation.