When you’re deep in the weeds every day, it’s easy to forget to zoom out.
That’s why, at the end of each year, I try to slow down and take stock of what the team, our partners, and our customers have built together.
It’s been a transformative year, so picking just a few things to highlight is tough, but I'm doing my best below!
Why we embraced commerce media
This year, we made a seemingly small but meaningful shift in how we talk about what Kard is and where we fit in the market. What we’ve been building all along aligns closely with the evolution of a new and exciting category: commerce media. Not as a buzzword or a pivot, but as a clearer way to describe the role we already play.
This was not a fundamental change in how we operate or what we build. The product, the roadmap, and the principles behind Kard remain the same. What changed is the scale of the opportunity that we have already been building in.
Kard sits at the intersection of purchase data, rewards, and loyalty. We help issuers deliver relevant offers at scale, help brands reach high-intent consumers with measurable outcomes, and do it in a way that is independent, privacy-first, and performance-driven. That is commerce media.
As the category continues to mature, clarity matters. Embracing commerce media gives our partners a better framework for understanding the opportunity ahead.
Partnerships that extended our reach
At the start of the year, I shared two goals for 2025:
- Expand into new markets
- Continue scaling both sides of our network
Partnerships played a big role in making progress on both.
Our issuer team continues to thrive, tripling the size of our network YTD. Reaching millions of additional monthly active users, further validating the power of our commerce-driven rewards.
This growth was highlighted by a key focus area of ours, which was expanding beyond our core customer base of fintechs to the broader consumer rewards space as well as the traditional financial services ecosystem.
The team has continued to execute through the end of this year, with even more partners currently integrating that will double our network scale in H1 of next year and we look forward to sharing more about these partnerships as they come to life.
On the merchant side, our network continued to expand as well. Our small but mighty team goes above and beyond each and every day, bringing on some of the biggest brands in the country and driving value for them, our issuers, and the heart of our platform, the consumer.
Most recently, we added thousands of dining offers through our partnership with Seated, bringing highly rated local restaurants into the Kard network and giving cardholders more ways to earn rewards.
Product updates that power what’s next
This year was about laying the foundation for some of our most ambitious product goals yet, including our move toward predictive offers. As Kard has expanded our database of transactions across all of our consumers’ spend, our model is able to learn not only what is relevant to a consumer based on where they’ve spent in the past, but can understand where they are most likely to transact in the future.
Before tackling those challenges, we focused on making it easier for partners to design, launch, and scale rewards experiences that feel native to their product. That meant investing heavily in our API and core infrastructure.
As Gary Poster, our VP of Product and Engineering, put it:
“We’ve designed our API to adapt and scale with our partners, minimizing lift for developers and future-proofing rewards programs as new features roll out.”
Some highlights from what we shipped this year:
- More flexible, fully branded rewards displays
- Customizable user notifications with attribution
- Live historical transaction updates
- Local offer caching for fast, responsive apps
- Continued investment in SOC 2 and PCI compliance
If you want the short version, here’s a four-minute overview from our Product Manager, Dolly Devashryee, walking through what we shipped and why.
Looking ahead, we are preparing pre-purchase notifications, new gamified offer formats, and more personalized, dynamic experiences that increase engagement and lifetime value for cardholders.
A marketing reset
In prior years, our marketing efforts were fragmented. This year, that changed.
With Sandra Bellows joining as Head of Marketing, we took a more deliberate approach to telling the Kard story. Over the past 11 months, she has:
- Launched several downloadable assets, including The Modern Consumer Journey based on $3B+ in transaction data
- Secured speaking opportunities and coverage at major industry events (catch the one from Brand Insider Summit: Retail here) and publications, like Grocery, QSR, and Marketing Dive.
- Grown our newsletter to 5,000+ subscribers
- Published case studies, customer interviews, and dozens of useful blog posts
I’m incredibly proud of the progress we made this year. Next year, we’ll lean even harder into what differentiates Kard as the first independent commerce media network, and I’m excited to build on the momentum we’ve created.
If you haven’t checked out our latest report, “15 Questions Retail Marketers are Asking Right Now” do yourself a favor and download it now. It’s the clearest snapshot we’ve published on what brands are prioritizing for 2026.
The fun we had along the way
We hit some big milestones this year, but made sure to enjoy the ride. We brought the team together for offsites, swapped Halloween photos, crushed the consistent conference circuit, and filled our Slack channels with snapshots of everything the team is doing.
These moments reminded us who we are outside of the day to day grind — and why this group works so well together.
It’s really true that building a great culture takes intention and consistency. I’ve seen that in spades this year, and am proud of the environment we’ve created at Kard: one that enables people to do their best.
2026, here we come
Our platform is powered by some of the largest payments ecosystems in the country, and we’re proud to partner with them and many more as we continue to scale our network.
We’ve helped some of the largest merchants reach tens of millions of consumers, prove measurable ROI, and build deeper relationships. And we can’t wait to continue to broaden both sides of our network.
We’ll be sharing our newest partnerships, customer success stories, and conference wins on LinkedIn, so if you’re not already keeping up with us there, please give us a follow. Cheers to a phenomenal 2025 and even bigger things in 2026.
