August 2023

  1. Historical Transaction Data Ingestion - Kard has expanded its capabilities to ingest multiple years of historical transaction data once an Issuer onboards with Kard. This will ensure all cardholders on our platform are receiving the most up to date offers and rewards based on their extended spending history by merging additional historical data with existing & live data.
  1. Revamped filtering on Start and Expiration Offer Dates on Portal - The start and expiration offers dates on the Offers page on the issuer portal take a range of values for each field. The filtering was revamped to correctly display results when a singular range value (either start or end) is given. See example below to better understand this functionality.

For example, filtering to 9/12/2023 at the start range for the “Start Date” field will display all offers that went live on or after September 12, 2023. 

  1. Enhanced filtering on Total Commission field on Offers Page on Portal - The total commission field filtering was optimized so that portal users can filter by this field to the tenth decimal place, instead of just integer level precision for more accurate total commission analysis. 

For example, applying this filter on the total commission will display all results where the total commission is between 7.5 and 9.5. 

  1. Portal Automatic Log Out Improvements - The automatic portal log out window was extended to three hours, so that users can productively use the portal for longer periods without having to log in on an hourly cadence. The portal now also takes into account idle time (no mouse / click activity detected), and will prompt users to take an action if they’ve been idle for 10 minutes (see figure below for prompt). If a user doesn’t take action for 5 more minutes, they’ll be logged out to ensure a secure portal experience.

After a user has been idle on the portal for 10 minutes, they can expect a similar message as above prompting them to take action within 5 minutes to avoid log out.

  1. Admin Portal Improvements: New functionalities were added to the Kard Admin portal to enable faster, and more efficient offer launches.

July 2023

New Features for the Issuer Portal Experience

  1. Exporting merchants, offers, and locations campaign data 

Exporting campaign data was previously only available via access to Kard’s API. The Kard Issuer Portal now provides our issuer clients a way to export all of their active rewards program data via CSV in a self-service workflow, so that marketing teams at our partner organizations can design better marketing materials to encourage banking activity by their cardholders.

  • Merchants page export: Portal users can retrieve the relevant merchant data fields shown on the portal (Merchant ID, Merchant Name, Source of Merchant, Website URL, and Merchant Category) for all merchants with active offers in their rewards program by clicking the “Export” button. 
  • Offers portal page export: In addition to merchant data, portal users can export the relevant offer data fields (Offer ID, Offer Name, Offer Type, Campaign Start Date, Campaign End Date, Commission Type, Total Commission, and isTargeted) for all active offers in their rewards program.
  • Locations portal page export: The Kard Issuer portal also supports the exporting of in-store location data (Location ID, Location Name, Street Address, City, State, and Zip Code) for all merchants running active campaigns with the issuer in question. 

Here's how to export these reports in the Issuer Portal:

Step 1: Navigate to the relevant page on the issuer portal (the Merchants page in this example). Apply the relevant filters and sorts on the fields that you want to export and click the “Export” button once ready. 
Step 2: When the “Export” button is clicked, the download will begin and the portal will display a banner stating that the export is in progress. 
Step 3: When the export is done downloading, the banner will indicate that the export is complete and the CSV file will be available to view.
The CSV file should match the layout of this sample export.
  1. Viewing “Under Review” transactions on Reports page 

Some transactions require a manual review as a part of the matching process to determine if they qualify for a reward. The Kard Portal introduces a new field on the Reports page, “Under Review,” which gives partnering issuers visibility into which transactions are awaiting manual review. 

  • Once a transaction has been selected for manual review, the status will be marked as “PENDING.” As transactions move through the manual review process and are either approved or rejected for a reward, they change to a “COMPLETED” status to indicate that the manual review process is finished. Transactions under manual review are constantly being reviewed to ensure the best possible user experience for our issuers clients and their cardholders.
  • If a transaction is successfully evaluated through our near-real-time transaction matching engine, the “Under Review” field will be undefined, displaying a small dash. 
Note the various values for the Under Review field.

Enhancements to the Issuer Portal Experience

  1. Collapsible Navigation Bar

The Kard Portal has been redesigned to deliver a crisper and more productive navigation experience by introducing the ability to collapse the main menu. When the navbar is collapsed, this addition is supplemented with clear user-friendly tags that show page names when relevant icons on the navbar are hovered over. 

The main menu is now collapsible.
  1. Improvements to “Status” field across portal pages 
  • Coloration on Merchants and Offers pages: The Kard Portal was visually refreshed to help highlight each of the three statuses (active, inactive, closed) of relevant merchants and offers shown for a more user-friendly experience.
Different statuses appear with different colors now.
  • Increased search and sorting options on Merchants and Offers pages: Issuer clients can now search by multiple statuses at the same time, as well as sort the statuses to better understand their rewards program data on the portal. 
Better sorting means a more precise view of available offers.
  1. Commission Clarity for Rewarded Transactions on Reports page 

Language for the commission received for each party (Kard, issuer) was improved, to provide better readability for partnering issuer clients.

New language helps users understand the data better at a glance.

Enhancements to Kard API Documentation

  1. The Issuer Earned Reward webhook documentation was updated to showcase both sample cardlinked reward webhook responses and also sample affiliate reward webhook responses, providing more clarity to our integrating issuer clients regarding the two offer types. See Issuer Earned Reward Webhook API docs here.
  2. UTC timezone specification language was added to the response schemas of all Rewards API endpoints (Merchants, Offers, and Locations). This will help our integrating issuer partners better understand the data available to them from the API. Refer to Rewards API docs here.
  3. Audit Code definitions and transaction audit API docs were revamped to match audit code definitions that exist on the issuer portal for better consistency. Refer to the updated audit code definitions docs here and transaction audit API docs here.

June 2023

Enhancements to Issuer Portal Experience

Version 1.9 of the Issuer Portal has been launched, featuring new functionalities that make it easier for our issuer partners to navigate and understand their rewards platform.

  • Better visibility into targeted offers: The “isTargeted” field was added to the “Offers” page in the issuer portal (see screenshot below), allowing users to filter offers based on whether they are targeted or global. 
  • Transaction support submission optimizations: The language on the Issuer Portal regarding transaction support submissions has been updated for increased process clarity.

Enhancements to the Kard Rewards API 

Version 1.29 of the Kard Rewards API has been launched, allowing issuers more flexibility in how they design their cardholders’ rewards experience.

  • Launch of “isTargeted” field: Added ability for issuers to view and filter offers based on whether they are targeted or global, using the offers API endpoints. Please refer to the API docs (see “isTargeted” field) for more details.
  • Merchant category filtering now available using “category” field: New functionality allows issuers to easily filter by merchant category when dealing with merchant API endpoints, offer API endpoints, and location API endpoints. Please refer to the API docs (see “category” field) for more details.

Enhancements to Matching Engine

The Kard matching engine was improved to support merchant category code (MCC) level matching, enabling our merchant partners to run more flexible campaigns on the Kard platform. This allows our merchants to specify redemption criteria on specific purchase categories when curating their campaigns.

May 2023

  • Portal Enhancements: New functionalities were added to the Kard Admin portal to allow offers to launch more efficiently.
  • API Documentation Updates: API documentation was corrected and enhanced to be more up to date with Kard’s functionality.
  • Matching Algorithm Optimizations: We introduced changes to our matching algorithm to increase both speed and accuracy of reward matches.

April 2023

  • Various product updates to improve stability and user experience.

March 2023

Portal UX Enhancements: New capabilities were added to the Kard Admin portal to improve the offers and locations loading experience for our internal team. Additionally, UX improvements were released to the Issuer portal. 

  1. Advanced multi-select and filtering on geographic fields (city, state, zip code) on the Locations page
  2. Increased visibility into commission type and total commissions to our issuer partners for each offer on the Offers page

Local Transaction Matching Enhancements: The algorithm was improved for increased precision on matching transactions to our local offers network.

API Documentation Updates: API documentation was corrected to provide a more accurate description for the BIN field within the cardInfo object in the request body schema for the add card and create user endpoints. Kard requires that a valid BIN of the first 6 digits is sent in the request payload.

February 2023

User Eligibility: Released new functionality that allows our partners to better personalize the experience for their cardholders and ensure they have access to their most relevant offers based on purchasing history. Cardholders will no longer need to rely on the terms & conditions to determine if they are eligible to redeem an offer as all offers served to the cardholder are ones they are eligible for.

January 2023

Portal Enhancements: New functionalities were added to the Kard Admin portal to allow offers to launch more efficiently. In addition, UX improvements were made to the Issuer portal.

December 2022

Various product updates to improve stability and user experience.

November 2022

Audience Engine 1.0: Kard’s new audience engine enables our internal team to segment our partnering issuers' cardholders based on their previous purchase history at our partnering national merchants. This allows our merchants to run flexible, targeted campaigns and allows our issuers to provide a personalized user experience by connecting their cardholders to the relevant CLO’s.

Audience Transaction Matching Improvements: Additional logic checks were added to the matching algorithm to ensure cardholders within a segment are able to redeem relevant offers.

API Documentation Updates: API documentation was corrected to provide more accurate descriptions for the createdDate and lastModifiedDates fields in the response schema for the get rewards merchants endpoints. In addition, the preferredContactEmail is now a required field for the create audit request endpoint.

Portal UX Enhancements: Functionalities were added to support offer targeting and audience creation for our internal teams, allowing faster brand launches. In addition, searching, filtering and sorting functionalities across modals within the issuer portal were revamped to provide a more consistent, user-friendly experience:

  1. Enhanced filtering experience on Merchant Categories
  2. Minor UX bug fixes related to latency, error messaging, and page navigation

October 2022

  • Various product updates to improve stability and user experience.

September 2022

  • Kard Issuer Portal (Read Only) - The Kard Portal experience for Issuers will provide Issuer partners more visibility into Kard’s reward ecosystem and their transaction data. It will also enable partners to submit & track support requests on a centralized UI.
Image: Reporting page on live transactions (Open image in new tab for full resolution)
Image: Offer module (Open image in new tab for full resolution)
Image: Merchants module (Open image in new tab for full resolution)
Image: Locations module (Open image in new tab for full resolution)
Image: Transaction support module (Open image in new tab for full resolution)

August 2022

  • Audit Support Form Added to Portal - Portal users will now have the ability to submit an audit support request directly in the Kard portal on the Transactions Support Page (limited to internal users until full Portal launch).

Image: Submit Support Request on Transaction Support Page

July 2022

  • Deprecate Legacy Services - Kard has officially sunset its original rewards endpoints. Unless otherwise discussed, all current and prospective clients are using the latest endpoints, highlighted here. The official sunset decreases maintenance for our development team.
  • Merchant Onboarding - An update to the merchant onboarding process allows Kard to launch merchants with greater efficiency, providing a better end user experience. 

June 2022

  • Card Overlap - To accommodate our Issuer partners who link cards that are not their own to their rewards program, Kard has built functionality that identifies instances of card overlap, so that one card cannot be used in two rewards programs. By default, if an overlap is identified, the program sponsored by the card’s issuer is utilized.
  • Matching Algorithm Enhancements - The algorithm now adds more transactions to its database for comparison and matching of future transactions, increasing the efficiency of the process.
  • Transaction Inquiry Management - A module was added to Kard’s internal portal to allow tracking and updates of any transaction that requires further investigation if it did not redeem an offer as expected. It provides faster triage and communication. This module will be part of the first Issuer Portal release, in Q3.
  • Matching Engine Performance - To stay ahead of Kard’s scaling platform, enhancements were added to the matching engine, increasing throughput by ~500%, to ensure matching in near real-time, regardless of the number of transactions moving through the product.
  • API Documentation Updates - API documentation updates including details on pagination and specifications to the incoming transactions call. Kard is constantly improving documentation to improve clarity.

May 2022

  • Qualification Fields on API - Surfaced all offer qualifications, such as Minimum Transaction Amount, to relevant Rewards API endpoints. This enables our issuer partners to highlight those fields separately to the end user, outside the terms and conditions, making for a more clear user experience.

April 2022

  • Various product updates to improve stability and user experience.

March 2022

  • Marqeta Integration - Kard has completed an integration to Marqeta’s APIs for the purpose of significantly reducing the integration effort required by an Issuer to add Kard’s services to their offering. Via the integration, Kard and Marqeta take ownership of tracking and communicating cardholder, card, and transaction data, so this data is not required to be passed from the Issuer to Kard. Review the Kard docs site for additional details.
  • Full Transaction Reporting via Portal - The Transactions module within the Kard Portal now reports on all relevant transactions, allowing for an accurate view of the data the platform ingests. Currently, this is only for internal Kard users, but we plan to release this functionality to our Issuer Partners in the coming months.
  • Affiliate Integration Enhancements - Updates to the integration with Kard’s affiliate partner means that we can decrease the time and effort needed to have our issuer partners go live with Affiliate / Digital offers.

February 2022

  • Various product updates to improve stability and user experience.

January 2022

  • Transaction Matching Algorithm MID Improvements - The transaction matching algorithm has added additional logic to identify potential redeemed rewards.
  • Search for Offers by Latitude / Longitude - The Get Locations endpoint can now filter by geolocation, with a radius measured in miles. This allows an issuer to implement a more precise user experience for cardholders using map functionality to find offers nearby.