Birdback wants to link your loyalty cards and vouchers directly to your cash card

Keeping track of all the different offers, vouchers and loyalty card schemes available to you can be a challenge at the best of times, and while lots of apps exist with the aim to combining all this info into one single, easier to manage repository, Birdback wants to get rid of them altogether.

Instead of managing the offers via an app, the company is now offering retailers, publishers and affiliate marketers the opportunity to integrate its Card-Linked Offers platform into their own systems, in order to allow their customers to redeem coupons and access discounts using their regular payment cards.

For customers, the process would go something this: seeing an offer you’re interested in on a participating retailer’s website, entering your payment card information into the website and then going to the store as normal to buy the item. When you get to the point of payment in-store, the offer/discount that you saw online is automatically applied to your purchase. On the business’ side, Birdback is in charge of capturing and storing the payment data entered into the website.

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It’s a smart move in more than one way – while removing complexity and the need for offer management via different platforms is obviously a benefit for consumers, it also makes it more likely that they will actually sign up in the first place, which is a benefit for the businesses. Plus, it doesn’t require the participating business to capture the data itself, removing one more piece of the puzzle.

Birdback says the key to its proposition is that it only takes one enticing offer for a customer to enter their card details, and from that point on that company can present future offers directly to that customer’s card in order to encourage repeat purchases. Birdback also said that unlike other mobile payment and similar services, it requires no apps, no hardware and doesn’t take a cut of every sale – only those where an offer is redeemed.

Clearly, the idea of making the process of using coupons as simple as possible has some legs. Alongside the announcement of its core platform the company also confirmed it had secured a $2.4 million investment round led by Passion Capital.

Services like this often live and die (in terms of consumer exposure) by the businesses that they manage to attract in the early days. To this end, Birdback said that the platform “isn’t technological theory” and that it will be announcing its first projects with retailers, affiliates and payment operators across Europe “very soon”.

➤ Birdback replaces vouchers and loyalty cards with… nothing [Birdback]

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