Kard & Marqeta Partnership Bridges Card Issuing and Rewards

The landscape of banking is changing – mostly, things are getting faster and easier. Small, agile, and often focused on serving a particular consumer niche, neobanks and challenger banks are capturing a larger and larger share of banking customers. This new digital banking paradigm created the need for software solutions that allow institutions to build compelling banking and payment experiences for their customers at scale, without the normal spin-up time or financial investment. When it comes to payments, cards are still king; almost all neobanks will look to issue some kind of payment card. And as they issue cards, more and more of these banks are realizing that rewards programs are essentially table stakes for their account holders to start swiping. In fact, in our 2021 State of Credit Report, 26% of US consumers said that rewards are the number one reason they choose a credit card.

Kard and Marqeta’s new partnership exists to help banking customers solve their rewards needs simply and quickly. While Marqeta has been powering the banking paradigm shift with card issuing and processing solutions, Kard has found a different niche: rewards as a service. Kard provides the software infrastructure and merchant network needed to reward cardholders for their everyday purchases. The heavy lifting of transaction matching, user management, and merchant onboarding all happens on Kard’s platform, allowing banks to get a powerful rewards program up and running relatively simply. Paired with the power of Marqeta’s issuing solutions, it takes a lot of the work out of building a card experience for customers.

Now, any business that partners with Marqeta to issue a payment card and partners with Kard to power rewards will be able to get to market even faster due to Marqeta’s and Kard’s partnership and pre-integration. After each swipe, Marqeta will send detailed transaction data directly to Kard’s rewards platform and Kard will use this information to power merchant rewards back to users. Customers no longer need to manage the passing of this transaction data to Kard themselves.

“We saw a trend with our customers looking for differentiated ways to enhance their card offering to build loyalty and engagement with their end users and that Kard was powering innovative solutions in this area. We are proud that this partnership is enabling our customers to get their rewards offerings to market faster and more seamlessly.” said Jazz Samra, VP of partnerships at Marqeta.

“I am beyond excited about our partnership with Marqeta. Marqeta makes it simple to issue a card, and through our partnership, Kard now makes it simple to offer rewards for those cards. We’re combining two of the most requested functionalities for a shared set of customers, and the integration speaks to the power of what our engineering and product teams have built. Scaling the Kard platform with partners like Marqeta helps us accomplish our mission of delivering the most rewarding payments experience possible,” said Ben Mackinnon, CEO of Kard.

Check out the documentation for the integration on Kard’s website.