Cardlytics, Inc. (Cardlytics) operates a commerce media platform that is designed to make commerce smarter and rewarding for everyone.
At the core of the company’s commerce media platform is the financial media network that it runs within its partners' digital channels, which includes online and mobile applications (the ‘Cardlytics platform’). Additionally, the company operates an identity resolution platform that utilizes point-of-sale (‘POS’) data, including product-level purchase data, to en...
Cardlytics, Inc. (Cardlytics) operates a commerce media platform that is designed to make commerce smarter and rewarding for everyone.
At the core of the company’s commerce media platform is the financial media network that it runs within its partners' digital channels, which includes online and mobile applications (the ‘Cardlytics platform’). Additionally, the company operates an identity resolution platform that utilizes point-of-sale (‘POS’) data, including product-level purchase data, to enable marketers to perform analytics and targeted loyalty marketing and measure the impact of their marketing (the ‘Bridg platform’). The partners for the Cardlytics platform are predominantly financial institutions (‘FI partners’) that provides the company with access to their anonymized purchase data and digital banking customers. The partners for the Bridg platform are predominantly merchants (‘merchant data partners’) that provides the company with access to their POS data, including product-level purchase data. By applying advanced analytics to the purchase data the company receives, it makes it actionable, helping marketers reach potential buyers at scale and measure the true sales impact of their marketing spend. The company makes strong relationships with leading marketers across a variety of industries, including everyday spend, specialty retail, restaurant, travel and entertainment.
The company’s data capabilities, coupled with its access to customers using its partners' digital channels, enable the company to help solve fundamental problems for marketers. With the Cardlytics platform, the company enables marketers to reach potential customers across its network of FI partners through their digital banking accounts and present them relevant offers to save money when they are thinking about their finances. With the Bridg platform, the company enables marketers to leverage their own POS data and reach their customers across a wide variety of digital advertising channels that they would not otherwise be able to identify and reach, or to reach customers based on their product-level past purchases. Marketers are also challenged to measure the performance of their marketing, and the company’s financial media network addresses these challenges by enabling marketers to precisely measure how marketing drives both in-store and online sales through ‘closed loop-measurement.’
Solutions
The Cardlytics Platform
Through the Cardlytics platform, the company’s financial media network, marketers can deliver advertising content to customers that allows them to earn rewards, which are funded with a portion of the fees it collects from marketers. Additionally, the Cardlytics platform benefits customers and enhances their overall experience by showing them relevant advertisements tailored to their spending patterns and specific interests. The company maintains the Cardlytics platform in both the United States (‘U.S.’) and the United Kingdom (‘U.K.’).
The Cardlytics platform helps marketers find potential new customers that are active in their category but not shopping with them, or to grow their business with existing customers. the company’s marketing is targeted and measured based on actual purchase data at a customer and account level. Unlike many other measurement solutions on which the marketing industry has historically relied, the company’s measurements are not probabilistic or based on models but are based on actual in-store and online purchases.
The breadth of the company’s network of FI partners means that it is able to offer marketers the ability to optimize their marketing efforts to reach a large number of consumers through a single point of contact. The Cardlytics platform also provides the company marketers a scalable solution for driving customer loyalty and engagement whereby Cardlytics handles everything from contracting with marketers and creating, managing and reporting performance of their campaigns to attributing incentives to each of its partners' customers.
The Cardlytics platform helps solve fundamental problems for the company’s FI partners. Leveraging the company’s powerful predictive analytics, it creates compelling rewards that has the potential to drive deeper and more sustained use of the FI's digital channels, which reduces customer attrition and increases use of the FI partners’ credit and debit cards. The company’s FI partners include Bank of America, National Association (‘Bank of America’), JPMorgan Chase Bank, National Association (‘Chase’), Wells Fargo Bank, National Association (‘Wells Fargo’), and American Express Travel Related Services Company, Inc. (‘American Express’), as well as many other national and regional financial institutions, financial technology companies and virtual-only banks. The company also partners with multiple bank processors and digital banking providers to help it reach customers of small and mid-sized FI partners.
The Bridg Platform
The Bridg platform is a customer data platform that utilizes POS data from the company’s merchant data partners, including product-level purchase data to enable marketers to perform analytics and targeted loyalty marketing. Bridg also enables marketers to measure the impact of their marketing. The Bridg platform's unique ability to identify, understand, and engage previously unreachable in-store customers is made possible through industry leading identity resolution capabilities, a proprietary census of customers' identity and characteristics, and unique strategic data partnerships. In 2023, the company launched an additional product offered through the Bridg platform, Rippl, its retail media network. This product is a unique solution that unlocks profitable retail media partnerships for regional grocers, brands, and consumer packaged goods companies by leveraging customer data to strengthen targeting capability for retail media purposes.
Data and Analytics
Purchase Data from FI Partners
Purchase data from the company’s FI partners provides a secure view into where and when consumers are spending their money. The company’s financial media network aggregates and analyzes purchase data without any personal data leaving the FI partners or otherwise being made available to the company. The data provided by the FI partner is anonymized so that it cannot be associated with any one individual. In the U.S., the Cardlytics platform ingests approximately one in every two debit and credit card transactions. This data allows the company to serve relevant advertisements to its FI partners' customers through the company’s financial media network. The company also leverages the power of its data to provide marketers utilizing its financial media network with valuable insights into the preferences of their actual or potential customers wherever they shop.
Point-of-Sale Data from Merchant Data Partners
Using POS data from the company’s merchant data partners and its proprietary bureau of offline identity information, the Bridg platform associate’s customer transactions with anonymized identifiers.
Advanced Analytics Capabilities
The company uses sophisticated quantitative methods to quickly access its massive volumes of data and make sense of past customer spend—and, importantly, predict future customer spend. The company’s analytics make its data actionable, enabling the company to develop insights that marketers and partners rely on to make more informed business decisions and create more meaningful customer connections.
For the company’s FI partners, it uses its analytics to optimize the offers the company displays to customers within its Cardlytics platform. By assigning relevancy scores to each offer based on what customers are most likely to buy, the company’s Cardlytics platform can present the most relevant offers more prominently in customers' mobile and online banking experiences.
Privacy and Security
Cardlytics Platform
The company takes privacy and security into account in the development and implementation of its systems and services. A critical part of the company’s strategy involves a design focused on gathering data without collecting, maintaining or using sensitive personal data, such as social security numbers, credit card numbers, financial account information or medical records. The company’s platforms are designed so that it does not receive or has access to any personal data from its FI partners. The company only targets marketing against anonymized data or data that has undergone processing such that it is only linked to anonymized identifiers. The company’s privacy and security standards has also been designed to meet the requirements, and safeguard the reputations, of its partners and marketers, many of which are large, multinational corporations. These customers frequently audit the company’s practices and engage in detailed assessments of its infrastructure.
The company’s Ad Server and Ads Manager form the core of the Cardlytics platform. The Ad Server is responsible for targeting and presenting offers, which are developed and designed within the Ads Manager. Each FI partner's Ad Server is either hosted at the FI partner's data center behind the FI partner's firewall or hosted by it on behalf of the FI partner. The Ad Server interfaces with the company’s FI partners' systems to receive anonymized purchase data, assign a unique consumer ID to each FI partners' customer, and aggregate this purchase data. The unique consumer ID is then used to assign offers, measure redemptions, and in limited cases, validate certain online purchases. The Ad Server also receives engagement data, such as impressions and activations, related to each unique consumer ID.
Ads Manager is hosted in cloud data centers behind the company’s firewall and is used to create, manage and publish marketing campaigns to each FI partner's Ad Server. Ads Manager also provides a majority of the functionality for managing configuration settings within each Ad Server and transferring data between Cardlytics and its FI partners.
The company has implemented a number of security controls. Certain of the company’s environments and systems has been certified as SOC 1 Type II or SOC 2 Type II compliant by third parties. The company enhances its network security through measures, such as network segmentation, firewalls and network and host-based intrusion detection at critical network aggregation and ingress/egress points.
Bridg Platform
The Bridg platform was designed to comply with applicable privacy laws and regulations. The Bridg platform also has built-in privacy protections to ensure that data provided by clients is never sold or shared without their consent, and personal data relating to newly identified consumers is never shared with the clients.
Growth Strategies
The principal components of the company’s strategy are to grow its business with marketers; continue to realize synergies between the Cardlytics and Bridg Platforms; drive growth through Existing FI partners; expand the network of partners; and grow the platform through integrations with partners.
Partners
The company defines a partner as a separate contracting entity from which it accesses data to empower its platforms either directly or through a third-party intermediary, such as a bank processor, digital banking provider or payment network operator. The partners for the Cardlytics platform are predominantly FI partners that provide the company with access to their anonymized purchase data and digital banking customers. the company generally pays its partners on the Cardlytics platform a Partner Share, which is a negotiated and fixed percentage of the company’s billings to marketers less any Consumer Incentives that it pays to the partners' customers and certain third-party data providers. The company’s agreements with its FI partners generally include an automatic renewal feature. The partners for the Bridg platform are merchant data partners that provide the company with access to their POS data, including product-level purchase data.
Agreements with Bank of America
The company’s relationship with Bank of America is governed by a General Services Agreement pursuant to which it provides Bank of America with access to the Cardlytics platform and certain other related services, and a related Statement of Work (collectively, the (‘GSA’), which grants Bank of America the right to use the software underlying the Cardlytics platform.
Pursuant to the GSA with Bank of America, the company provides the Cardlytics platform to Bank of America customers, and as part of its services it forms relationships with participating marketers and obtain and publish marketer offers to Bank of America customers. Bank of America has the right to approve all offers to be presented to Bank of America customers on the Cardlytics platform.
Under the GSA, the company shares the revenue that it generates from the sale of advertising within the Bank of America channel with Bank of America, subject to certain exceptions.
Agreements with Chase
In May 2018, the company entered into a Master Agreement and Schedule to the Master Agreement (collectively, the ‘Master Agreement’) with Chase, pursuant to which it provides Chase with access to the Cardlytics platform. Under the Master Agreement, the company provides Chase with access to the Cardlytics platform through November 19, 2025. The Master Agreement will automatically renew for 12-month periods thereafter, unless terminated earlier in accordance with the terms of the Master Agreement.
Sales and Marketing
The company’s sales teams are focused on growing its share of advertising budgets from existing marketers and attracting new brands, merchants and service providers, both directly and through advertising agencies. The company’s marketing efforts are focused on increasing brand awareness for Cardlytics and Bridg through partnerships, public relations, industry events and publications.
The company has dedicated sales teams responsible for establishing relationships with marketers and their agencies. The company’s sales teams are organized by industry, which include everyday spend, specialty retail, restaurant, travel and entertainment. Each industry team is led by an experienced sales manager and staffed with sales, sales support and service specialists who has deep domain knowledge and industry operating experience. The company also has account managers that manage its customer relationships within each industry and focus on deepening relationships with existing partners and expanding the company’s network.
The company also has a dedicated FI partner sales team focused on expanding its network by both nurturing the company’s existing relationships and cultivating new relationships with FI partners. The company’s FI partner sales team helps drive adoption of its solution offerings and partners with FIs to develop curated content and enhancements to the user experience for FI partners' customers to drive increased engagement with the Cardlytics Platform.
Intellectual Property
As of December 31, 2024, the company had seventeen issued patents relating to its software. The company has registered, or is registering, the ‘Cardlytics,’ ‘Bridg’ and ‘Rippl’ names and logos in the U.S. and certain other countries. The company has registrations or pending applications for additional marks in the U.S. and other countries.
The company is the registered holder of a variety of domestic and international domain names that include cardlytics.com, dosh.com, bridg.com, and similar variations on those names.
Seasonality
The company’s cash flows from operations vary from quarter to quarter (for the year ended December 2024), largely due to the seasonal nature of its marketers' advertising spending. Many marketers tend to devote a significant portion of their marketing budgets to the fourth quarter of the calendar year to coincide with consumer holiday spending and reduce their marketing budgets in the first quarter of the calendar year.
History
Cardlytics, Inc. was founded in 2008. The company was incorporated under the laws of the state of Delaware in 2008.
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