Two years ago, we reached over one million consumers—a huge milestone. Now, we’re reaching over fifteen million consumers, which means we’re processing millions of transactions per day.
To keep pace, we’ve had to make a laundry list of updates to the back-end of our platform. With our new portal release, we’re happy to announce that our front-end is taking the spotlight.
Our new, highly secure, SSO-friendly portal helps issuers visualize their card-linked offer return on investment, glean valuable insights from their campaigns, and stay up to date on their offer performance anytime, anywhere.
Kard’s VP of Product & Engineering, Gary Poster, shares:
“Our current focus is building a platform that allows issuers to create loyalty experiences that are tailored to their business and customer set. The portal is giving them the agency and the data they need to design delightful experiences for their cardholders.”
Below, we share the why behind the issuer portal, highlight its standout features, and outline our vision for an all-in-one loyalty platform for our issuers.
Why build an issuer loyalty portal?
Kard’s API is the foundation for our platform, enabling the best possible cardholder experiences through data collection, offer matching, and timely payouts.
But it’s tough to understand the end-to-end loyalty experience Kard provides through an API alone, particularly for teams in non-technical roles. That's why we created an all-in-one issuer portal.
Gary explains:
“We are prioritizing measurable outcomes and actionable insights for our issuers so that they can provide an amazing cardholder experience. An intuitive and informative portal is the first major step in that direction.”
We envision our new portal as a centralized place for issuer teams to:
Holistically plan loyalty
Before the portal, issuers had to work directly with the Kard team to create, execute, and measure campaigns—at least one month in advance. While this approach has worked for us in the past, it can’t scale as our customer list grows.
With the new portal, issuers will be able to launch their own offers, reducing communications with Kard AMs and giving them full control over their rewards programs.
We’ve already begun streamlining this process by adding a holistic offers page, real-time notifications, and an always-on dashboard to the portal homepage.
These features give issuers the insights they need to experiment with new offers and tailor them to specific segments of their audience—and we happen to be launching more exciting offer types later this year.
Establish offer marketing roadmaps
The portal’s offer list view allows any issuer user to see which offers are going live and when, giving GTM teams ample time to create one-off cardholder marketing campaigns for each offer or type of offer.If needed, they can export offer details from Kard and import them into a project management tool for easier campaign development.
Actively marketing live offers boosts offer awareness, increases conversions, and keeps loyalty top of mind for cardholders.
Know where offers stand — anytime, anywhere
Issuers want to know where their offers stand at any given time but may not always have a chance to log into the portal for a deeper look.
Our new notification system sends users emails whenever new offers launch and expiration dates are changed or expiration dates are changed.
These alerts not only keep admins up to date, they also help them proactively inform cardholders of new offers or extended deadlines, accelerating customer acquisition and fostering long-term loyalty among their existing customer base.
We plan to add more useful alerts as we launch additional loyalty offerings.
Easily track offer performance
Kard’s dashboard metrics show issuers everything they need to know about offer performance at a glance—from total enrollment to total processed transactions to total commissions.
For a deeper dive, they can filter on specific date ranges (monthly vs. quarterly), offer types (in-store vs. online), and merchant sources (national vs. local).
Ultimately, having real-time data at their fingertips enables issuers to understand loyalty better. They can:
- See which loyalty opportunities resonate most with their user base, especially around holidays or periods of growth.
- Determine which levers to pull to drive stronger engagement.
- Understand whether new loyalty plays, bigger marketing splashes, or changes to app UX drive specific user behavior.
- Reveal patterns that might inform future offers.
As the Kard platform continues to support more advanced loyalty use cases, our cardholder insights will become even richer. And we plan to grow our portal in tandem.
We’re currently working on surfacing hidden trends through the power of machine learning, enabling issuers to review and act on them quickly. Eventually, we hope to get to the point where issuers can create and sell proprietary data products straight from the Kard platform.
Where we’re headed next
We're deep in the heart of building more exciting features and capabilities to allow issuers (and merchants) to build their own loyalty programs, leverage Kard’s powerful data set, and capture more customers for life.
Gary says:
“The portal has set us on a path toward a fully integrated platform with CLO, programmatic advertising, SKU-level offers, and more. We’re excited to see the unique offer experiences the portal inspires.”
Reach out to the Kard sales team to start building your own loyalty program today.
