DCA Commerce Code

This week on Commerce Code, we speak with Atif Mirza from VantageScore and Paul Siegfried from TransUnion. VantageScore is a credit score modeling and analytics company focused on innovation and financial inclusion, and TransUnion is a major credit reporting agency and a global information and insights company focused on building trust in global commerce.

Today we are talking about:

• Credit health for consumers overall
• The growth of BNPL and where that fits in
• What it means for the outlook for 2025
• We briefly contemplate what the world would have been like if consumers had even more access to bell-bottom jeans in 1976 - it’s either a terrifying or wonderful thought, depending on your aesthetics

This week on Commerce Code we speak with with Miraj Patel, CEO & Co-Founder of Harness. Harness is a leading financial technology platform that helps nonprofits, financial institutions, and brands grow Revenue, Engagement, Loyalty, and Community. Today we are talking about major changes in the college sports world - and in particular the financing of college sports, something that’s changing in a huge and unpredictable way right now. Harness has jumped into that fray by powering something called GameChange - you’ll hear on the show what that is and what it does.

This week on Commerce Code we speak with Avinash Chukka of Cardlytics and Brett Watson and Jeff Hudson of The Coupon Bureau.

Listeners to Commerce Code will know who Cardlytics is - they were a pioneer and primary player in the CLO industry from the start. The Coupon Bureau (TCB) is a nonprofit industry association, like DCA-CardLinx, that was created to develop and promulgate a universal standard for digital coupons. As TCB says, their mission is to seamlessly connect manufacturers, retailers, and consumers with secure, cutting-edge coupon solutions.

Notice the word manufacturers in there - a key piece of this is product brands who would otherwise be issuing paper coupons; this creates a secure digital standard for them to use that merchants can recognize. And it will allow Cardlytics to bring new offers to consumers through their platform.

Episode 180: Reimagining Global Offers: Tokenization’s Impact on Issuers, Merchants & Consumers

This week on Commerce Code we speak with Peter Schultze, Chief Executive Officer of Kigo, and Ben Straley, President and Chief Product Officer at Kigo. Kigo has developed a tokenized offer delivery system that complements existing card-linked offer networks. Today we're talking about how their approach makes it possible to reimagine value delivery for issuers, merchants and consumers.

Through tokenization, the Kigo system is able to deliver more content, more merchant flexibility, instant value to the cardholder, and better attribution. On top of that, offers are shareable and dynamic, so the offer can change even after a consumer has received it.

Taken together, this can drive astonishing new relevance and personalization for the cardholder community—and significant new sources of income for issuers and payment networks.

This week on Commerce Code we speak with Peter Vogel, Chief Revenue Officer at vLoyalty. vLoyalty provides an automated loyalty enrollment and tracking system based on users' credit cards, with text confirmation and marketing to consumers via SMS text. Most importantly, it automates the parts of loyalty programs that tend to break down in a retail environment.

In today's episode, we're talking about:

• How rare it is for front-line staff at merchants to even ask customers if they are members of the merchant's loyalty program - and the huge missed opportunities at the merchant as a result
• Point of sale technology as a solution to this problem - making it operationally feasible to serve customers well while also ensuring they are enrolled in a loyalty program and getting its full benefit once they are
• How to show return on investment in the digital loyalty program space

This week on Commerce Code we speak with Christian Widhalm, Chief Executive Officer of Bloom Credit. Bloom Credit's goal is to help everyone from startups to established banks easily access and furnish accurate credit data. The goal is to support the creation of accessible, unique financial products for everyone. Today, we are talking about a new product Bloom has developed that makes it easy for consumers to permission access to their payments data in a way that can dramatically improve credit file accuracy and access to credit for consumers.

This week on Commerce Code we speak with Joe Fitzgerald, Co-Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Dfinitiv. Dfinitiv has introduced a new platform they call SmartOffers, focused on significantly improving CLO benefits for FIs, merchants and consumers. Today we are talking about:

• The growing gap between app-based consumer experiences - especially what Gen Z is most used to - and what CLOs currently deliver
• The big forces reshaping the CLO environment - and how that may or may not fix the "stuck flywheel" of CLO
• What is a CLO anyway?

This week on Commerce Code we speak with Jeff Richardson, Senior Vice President & Head of Marketing at VantageScore, and host of The Score podcast, a source for credit score related news and analysis. VantageScore's mission is to innovate to deliver more predictive, innovative and inclusive credit score models for the US market. Today we are talking about:

• The most recent VantageScore market adoption study, and what it tells us about the state of credit risk
• Lenders' attitudes towards 2024, as we come out of a bit of a rough year in 2023
• Innovations that are changing the market for consumer credit and credit analysis going forward

This week on Commerce Code we speak with Ingrid Wilson, Head of Partnerships & Client Growth at Olive. Olive builds digital commerce platforms for fintechs - and those platforms offer consumers fundraising, financial wellness, and membership and loyalty solutions. Today we are talking about:

• The buy vs. build decision fintechs are making as they create customer-facing capabilities
• Risks that change that buy vs. build decision - and other factors like speed and cost
• The talent market - and the size of fintech in the global scheme of things

This week on Commerce Code, we speak with Alex Adelman, CEO & Co-Founder of Lolli. Lolli is a cashback and bitcoin rewards platform that lets users earn rewards at over 25,000 leading stores and brands. Lolli is based in New York City and founded in 2018 by Alex. In the interview, we talk about:

• Lolli’s bank-integrated card-linked offer platform
• bitcoin-driven loyalty rewards
• rich transactional data used to create compelling experiences and offers for consumers, and
• there are a few detours into psychology, history, finance and technology to boot