Cardlytics On The Value Of Data

The PYMNTS team caught up with experts in the payments field to ask them their views on industry trends, predictions for the coming year and what their ideal payments system looks like — and how far off that vision is.

Here’s what John Brown, President of U.S. Operations at Cardlytics, had to say.

Biggest Trends

JB: My take is that the big trend around payments, at least from our vantage point is that there’s a tremendous amount of value in that data in and of itself. It’s not just about making the payment, but also about how you can leverage the payment into other things. There are lots of companies, in addition to Cardlytics, who are doing things around that. It’s in some ways heartening to see, even though some of it may be competitive to us, because it shows that this is a real industry, this is a real business.

Preparing for 2016 and Beyond

JB:  There are two vectors of growth for us — one is, we’re continuing to build out our network of financial institutions. We do view ourselves as a network in the sense that we offer content from advertisers and we distribute that out to the financial institutions that we work with. So building out that network is really big.

We’re finding a lot of our analytical products to help advertisers understand their marketplace a little bit better. There are some companies out there today that have data transaction analytical products to help advertisers understand how they are performing in the Los Angeles MSA versus their competitors. But they may not have absolute rights to the data or other kind of limitations. We’re working directly with the source, which is the financial institution, so we have the ability to create further refined analytical products for advertisers. What we’re going to be rolling out is a lot more kind of toolkit things, where advertisers can log into us directly and get real-time information about what’s happening in terms of spending.

The Ideal Payments System

JB: I don’t think there is a perfect payments system. I think what you’re going to continue to see is a million different types of niche players that service micro-needs within the market and I think you’re going to continue to see those explode. It’s kind of crazy, but I think it works for us.