The ExxonMobil Rewards+ App for United States, and SpeedPass+ for Canada are Consumer Face apps, being a huge opportunity I had to focus on B2C. The value proposition of the Apps is to allow drivers to find the closest Exxon, Mobil, or Imperial Oil Gas Stations, allowing users to pay from the convenience of their vehicles, utilizing Apple Pay, Google Pay or their onboarded credit cards. On top of that, the apps are a huge opportunity to raise the partnership with Gas Stations and their convenience stores. We wanted to leverage loyalty points and allow consumers to exchange those points for products at the convenience stores. As such opportunities arose, we ideated on how great it could be if on top of the loyalty points and the station finder, users could also have access to the highlighted convenience store offers for their loyalty points exchange. This is what we defined as our opportunity to continue to put consumers at the heart of what we did with our product management.

Interestingly enough, as you manage a consumer facing product, you will end up facing other challenges. We needed to have internal debates whether the accessibility considerations for people with disabilities were sufficient. Also, user experience, being very important was also taken into consideration. Finally, we needed to look into our metrics, looking into important KPIs such as growth, retention, acquisition and gross margin. Those types of debates made us look into the need to grow our user base and find tactical solutions to make it happen. This is how we ended up looking into partnerships and AARP sounded to be a very good one to help communities to adopt ExxonMobil Rewards+ as their app of choice for gas needs.

One may ask how to foster innovation with a competitive environment, seeking the blue ocean when many Oil and Gas companies also developed their own apps. While ExxonMobil Rewards was the first, we acknowledge competititors emerged with that market and studying the types of competition, we know that reliability and convenience are very important for customers. Having said that we raised our partnership with Apple to be one of the first companies to implement the new concept called AppClips. It was announced at WWDC and implemented by Apple as part of IOS 14, allowing companies to create lighter versions of their mobile apps, providing a flavor of the user experience to users and giving the choice to customers to install the full version based on their needs. The opportunity to work with Apple on their new innovation was an amazing experience, where ExxonMobil decided to have AppClips ' NFC Tags ' on their gas stations for users to install these light versions and experiment on.

We also have a strong user base not utilizing Apple Devices, and similarly, we wanted to explore with Google on their NFC offer as well. We spent months with Google focusing on ways to have ExxonMobil Rewards being able to scan Google's NFC tag for maximized throughput for Android devices as well. Partnerships with Apple and Google certainly helped with the convenience and reliability we needed to have our consumers looking into our mobile products as the best market references, but still, we could never rest without another question: Could we innovate more? The answer is yes, we haven't talked with Amazon yet.

Amazon, with a strong offer around Alexa could be a great opportunity to help with convenience, as well as accessibility. There are people with disabilities relying on audio services and AI, and we knew Amazon's Alexa could be a great opportunity to explore. We wanted to simply come out with a nice and concise request to Alexa, such as "Alexa, pay for Fuel", and see the magic happen. We ended up concluding that implementation and this was a huge opportunity to focus on the advertisements of our products to the public.

Those were two years focusing on this amazing opportunity to impact the lives of over 30 million of users in the United States and Canada. It was a great responsibility, but also, it made me humble enough to know while it is easy to find reasons to celebrate, the impact is proportional to the number of users, therefore, actions need care, love, and passion for our customers. It is more than vehicles, or gasoline. People could need their vehicles back on track immediately to take care of their loved ones! With IT, we are here to make people's lives convenient and they count on our digital offers to live their lives.

Would you like to hear more? Let me know!