We’ve had a remarkable year at Kard! These past twelve months were marked by extraordinary growth in our network and big improvements to our platform. Technologically, 2021 marked the launch of our internal matching algorithm, a secret weapon at the core of our platform that allows us to match transaction data with the right merchant offers in near real-time. It’s a good thing we rolled it out, too — because this year we also increased our total transaction volume by six times.
Transaction volume is a function of the number of cardholders in the network and the value of the offers available to them, two other metrics we blew out of the water. Our banking customer base increased by seven times, bringing us millions of new cardholders and tens of millions of eyes on our merchants’ offers. Similarly, we more than tripled the number of brands in our merchant network, onboarding all manner of retailers, e-tailers, restaurants, and more.
In human terms, we matched our business growth by tripling the size of our team to handle all of our new throughput. The Kard team now spans three countries! It wouldn’t surprise us if we tripled again in 2022.
What’s Ahead for You
We’re approaching warp speed in every sense, and nothing tells that story more clearly than the upcoming growth of our network. By the time we come back from the holidays, we’ll be finalizing new issuer and merchant partnerships that add millions of cardholders and thousands of doors. A bigger network means more of everything — more offers, more transactions, more rewards, more happy shoppers. And that means scale. Lots of it.
To handle all of the “mores,” our product and engineering teams will be busy building out the platform. A web portal for both issuer and merchants where they can access data and reporting in real time, improvements to our matching algorithm, and better personalized offer opportunities sit at the top of the list. Our goal isn’t just to handle our current (considerable) transaction volume; our goal is to build a platform so robust that we can onboard millions of new cardholders and hundreds of new offers in the blink of an eye.
We’re also targeting faster and simpler integration and better self-service in 2022. We’ve been beta testing some new and improved features like seamless transaction reporting and in-portal offer management, which will help our merchant partners find and retain the right customers. We also have plans to improve the existing merchant and location filtering features in our issuer API, dramatically reducing the implementation time for our issuer partners and making it easier for them to delight every customer on their books with exactly the right offers.
We started this year as a smaller player in the rewards space, and over a period of twelve months we became one of the leading card-linked offer platforms for the modern issuer. The great machine has already roared to life; with some careful tinkering and some sophisticated new features, we expect it to purr right along.
The Future of Kard (is merry and bright!)
The first thing in our future is a well-earned holiday break for the Kard team: Kard’s offices will be closing on December 23, to reopen on January 3. It’ll be eggnog and pajamas for some of us and snowy mountain terrain for others. We hope you and yours will find the right way to reconnect, too!
When we come back, we’ll get right down to building. Kard’s progress this year is nothing short of meteoric, and the work we’ve done has laid the groundwork for even bigger news in the coming year. Everything feeds into everything else here, a constant gathering of momentum; new issuers means more merchant interest, which means more offers and rewards, which means more transactions…which brings us back to more issuer interest. Be on the lookout for Kard to take on new team members, for the Kard network to grow by issuer leaps and merchant bounds, and for the platform to take on a life of its own.
Oh, and buckle up. Take it from us — warp speed is very, very fast.
