At Kard, we’re focused on building a platform that meets issuers where they are — giving them the tools to deliver the exact experience they want, in the way that works best for their teams and their cardholders.
That’s why our latest API enhancements are designed to make it easier than ever to develop and deliver a rewards experience, from how offers show up in a banking app to how they are implemented on the backend.
With these updates, launching a custom rewards program is faster, more secure, and more adaptable to any issuer’s needs. Fintech marketers can accelerate brand growth, boost engagement, and push their cards to top of wallet — all without unnecessary overhead.
Brands benefit from this newfound efficiency as well. Our new API functionality lays the foundation for customizable notifications, gamified offers, and even clearer attribution.
Below, we break down each new feature and how it helps issuers and leading brands create seamless, personalized reward experiences that drive real results.
Don't have time for the full read?
Watch Kard Product Manager, Dolly Devashryee, give a high-level overview of what we shipped and why:
Customizing the consumer journey
The cardholder experience is everything. From day one, Kard’s API-first approach has empowered issuers to shape that experience to match their brand. The features below build on that foundation, giving issuers even more control over how rewards are presented, triggered, and personalized.
A flexible display (guided by best practices)
Kard’s API is built to provide issuers total freedom over the way their rewards are displayed to end users in a banking app or rewards platform. This flexibility allows issuers to maintain their branding and messaging across all of their customer touchpoints, making their rewards program feel like their own.
But we also know that frontend design can be a heavy lift for our integrators.
So the first thing we’ve done is create a stronger product design framework to help design their rewards UX, and are planning to launch a series of server side SDKs to reduce backend development time even further.
Forthcoming SDKs will support multiple languages (TypeScript/Javascript, Java, Python, and Go) so that any engineering team can go live with a rewards program in days.
“By sharing best practices, tips, and documentation upfront, issuers can get their rewards program up and running faster. That way, marketers can spend more time amplifying the rewards program and encouraging engagement and developers have more time to work on other pressing projects.” - Dolly Devashryee, Product Manager at Kard.
Customizable user notifications
Every issuer interacts with users differently, which is why we’ve built Kard’s notification API to support a wide range of notification formats, triggers, and messaging styles.
Issuers can customize how and when users are notified, including alerts when a reward is redeemed or when cash back is confirmed.
If you’re looking to launch quickly, we also provide ready-to-use copy based on what’s performed well across our network. Issuers can reuse or edit to fit their needs.
We’ve already seen issuers deploy personalized notifications across a variety of touchpoints, and we’re continuing to expand the types of events that can trigger them.
Notification attribution
We also know that issuers (and brands) want to know exactly how users are interacting with offer notifications so that they can determine:
- What messaging works best
- What presentation drives clicks
- What kinds of offers produce the most engagement
Kard’s API collects impression and view events, tracking whenever users engage with their rewards experience touchpoints, whether they are browsing the rewards section of a banking app or receiving a push notification. This gives issuers credit for driving engagement and helps brands understand which offer placements and formats are most effective.
In the future, we plan to make pre-purchase notifications available, such as offer reminders or notifications when new offers go live. These will give issuers and brands more options for deploying personalized (and attributable) ways to connect with cardholders at the right moment.
Powering rewards with scalable infrastructure
On the backend, we’ve continued to expand our modular architecture, building features that make it easier for issuers to configure, optimize, and scale rewards.
Live historical transaction updates
Most issuers feed the Kard team historical data before going live with rewards. That way, consumers can be more accurately placed in specific audiences — a high-value feature for brands and retailers who are trying to target certain audiences like new customers, lapsed customers, or customers in a particular geography.
Previously, this process involved a one-time bulk upload at the start of the implementation. While that worked for many, it didn’t account for cards added to digital wallets or linked to rewards after that bulk upload occurred, which led to gaps in user data.
Now, Kard’s API supports live historical transaction data updates, keeping records in sync as new cards are surfaced across an issuer’s ecosystem so that users receive the most relevant offers based on their previous spending behavior. This is particularly useful for our aggregator partners, whose integrations often involve new cards showing up with pre-existing transactions.
While not every issuer will need this feature, it’s part of Kard’s commitment to modularity, equipping partners with flexible tools to deliver a seamless, personalized rewards experience.
Local offer caching
Most of our issuers use our highly robust APIs to serve personalized offers to their customers, but some prefer other methods that enable them to manage offer delivery independently. Given the highly dynamic nature of our rewards, this constraint hindered the kind of flexible rewards experiences our issuers aimed to deliver to their users.
To address this, we’ve introduced a diff-based approach that enables issuers to maintain a cache and serve up-to-date offers — even when those offers are changing frequently. Kard’s notification API automatically tracks and shares user state changes so that issuers can subscribe to these events and maintain a dynamic cache. This empowers developers to integrate in ways they feel is best to keep their apps responsive and traffic efficient.
We see it as another step in Kard’s modular design philosophy: giving issuers the flexibility to integrate in the way that works best for them.
SOC 2 & PCI SAQ compliance
Kard’s API is built for security and privacy from the ground up. By design, we don’t collect any PII, and we operate in full compliance with SOC 2 and PCI SAQ standards.
Not only is this in line with enterprise issuer expectations, it’s also a boon for consumers who may be wary of sharing data when engaging with rewards programs.
As we continue to build more modular features, security and compliance remain fundamental. In the coming months, our engineering team is working on rolling out optional VPNs, adding another layer of protection for enterprise issuers if they choose to use it.
More enhancements on the way
Soon, issuers will be able to receive real-time notifications when audits are in progress or closed, making it even easier to support users when their cash back rewards are in question. Simply hook up your CRM tools to Kard’s audit APIs to create audit requests in bulk and then build triggers to notify end customers every time a request is updated.
We’re also preparing to introduce new, gamified offer formats designed to increase cardholder engagement, loyalty, and lifetime value, powered by our upcoming dynamic offer cache. These formats will enable more responsive, personalized offers that make rewards more engaging for users and more impactful — for issuers and brands alike.
What’s most exciting is that this is just the beginning. As our platform evolves, so will the ways our partners can deliver differentiated rewards that delight cardholders and drive long-term value.
“We designed our API-first platform to adapt and scale with our partners, minimizing lift for developers and future-proofing rewards programs as new features roll out. Whether you're an emerging fintech or an established enterprise, Kard is making it easy to deliver a secure, differentiated, high-impact rewards experience.” - Gary Poster, Kard’s VP of Product and Engineering.
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