Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast DCA Commerce Code

EPISODE 186C:

This is the third installment in our three-part series on intelligent shopping agents - an extended conversation with Shawn Conahan, Chief Revenue Officer at Wildfire Systems. In the first episode, Shawn laid out what ISAs are, and in the second episode we talked about how ISAs will affect payments, consumers and merchants. At the end of that episode, Dan had just asked Shawn how they would affect loyalty programs - and since Wildfire Systems is a key player in the loyalty market, Shawn’s answer won’t disappoint you - he’s thought about this a lot, and his answer is thoroughly researched. Let’s pick up the conversation where we left off. Shawn - what does this all mean for loyalty programs?

EPISODE 186B:

This is the second installment in our three-part series on intelligent shopping agents - an extended conversation with Shawn Conahan, Chief Revenue Officer at Wildfire Systems. In Monday’s episode, Shawn laid out what ISAs are, and when we concluded Dan had just asked him how shopping (search, selection, and payment) fully integrated into AI platforms like Perplexity or Chat GPT would affect the payments industry. Let’s pick up the conversation where we left off. Shawn - what does this all mean for the payments industry?

EPISODE 186A

This week on Commerce Code, we have a first-of-its kind, three-episode Commerce Code Deep Dive on AI Shopping Agents. For all three episodes, we speak with Shawn Conahan, Chief Revenue Officer at Wildfire Systems. Wildfire provides white-label shopping rewards and cashback platforms to companies like Microsoft, Visa, Citi, and RBC.

By the end of this first episode, you will see how huge the implications are of AI shopping agents - and you will probably be out playing with them if you haven’t already.

Wednesday’s episode will unpack what AI Shopping Agents mean for Payments, Consumers and Merchants. We don’t want to spoil it for you, but in that conversation, we might conclude that when the dust has settled, payments will still exist, consumers will still exist, and merchants … might or might not still exist, depending.

And in the third episode, we’ll take a look at how AI shopping agents will affect Loyalty and Marketing, Google, Amazon, and other fundamental things we take for granted today.

Stay tuned for our first of three episodes in this week’s series: Intelligent Shopping Agents Attack! What Are They, and What Are They Doing?

This week on Commerce Code, we speak with Chrissy Maitland, General Manager of Rakuten Card Linked Offers. Rakuten is a longstanding leader in DCA-CardLinx, and powers the card-linked offer programs for leading financial services companies, mobile app providers and loyalty rewards programs. They provide merchants with a scalable pay-for-performance channel that efficiently drives traffic and sales in-Store and online. Today we are talking about:

• The changed consumer environment in 2025
• The importance of value to consumers now
• What that looks like in light of a very fast-moving political and economic situation globally
• What merchants, financial services companies and other digital commerce professionals need to do to adapt and grow during what is already a complicated year

This week on Commerce Code, we speak with John Taylor Garner, Founder & CEO of Odynn. Odynn has built the Awayz platform that creates the ability for customers to book hotels and flights with side-by-side points, miles, and cash pricing.

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

This week on Commerce Code, we speak with Kelli Hobbs, VP, Head of US Business Development at Valuedynamx, and Paras Joshi, Strategy & Development Officer at Valuedynamx. Valuedynamx is a leading global provider of purchase rewards, and they are a part of Collinson, which provides a leading global travel ecosystem.

We are talking about:

• Challenges in the increasingly competitive loyalty space
• Ways to maintain or enhance engagement among loyalty program members
• How to increase value to consumers and merchants by making program points redeemable where consumers most want to redeem them

This week on Commerce Code, we speak with Avery Miller from RBC and Shawn Conahan from Wildfire Systems about the evolution of FI loyalty and rewards programs. Avery is VP of Avion Rewards Shopping and Digital Product at RBC. RBC is one of the world's leading FIs, headquartered in Toronto; they serve 17 million clients in Canada, the U.S. and 27 other countries. Shawn is the Chief Revenue Officer at Wildfire Systems, which provides white-label shopping rewards and cashback platforms to leading companies like Microsoft, Visa, Citi - and of course RBC.

We are talking about:

• The challenges FI loyalty programs face
• How consumers experience FI loyalty programs - and how their preferences are driving change
• RBC's response to those challenges and changing preferences
• What's next for the sector as the evolution continues

Additional Resources:

• Harvard Business Review: Are You Undervaluing Your Customers?
• BCG/Wildfire Whitepaper: Loyalty 2.0 - Making Loyalty Pay
• Wildfire Article: Banking on Shopping Rewards: Why Financial Institutions are Prioritizing These Rewards Programs

This week on Commerce Code we speak with Surge Berg, Alexis Wiktorski and Jeff Zilberman of BN, an Augeo Company. BN uses AI to help brands enable employees and customers to be effective brand advocates. Their tools make it easy for brand advocates to create social media content, and they make it easy for companies to manage the risks that come along with social media brand advocacy. Today we're talking about:

• What's new in 2024
• The total brand advocacy opportunity - what can grassroots social media do for companies?
• Brand advocacy horror stories
• And finally - how companies can get their brand advocacy strategy started.

This week on Commerce Code, Dan is coming back from a conference on Web3 at the University of Chicago - he was there to interview Ryne Miller, the former General Counsel of FTX U.S. They had a fascinating conversation and Dan is reflecting on some of his takeaways from the conference overall:

• Scandals and whether they have anything to do with Web3 or innovation
• Risk and innovation - and different kinds of risk
• Global markets and innovation

Stay tuned as we creep up and look over the precipice of the volcano at the risks and possibilities of Web3 and cryptocurrencies.

This week on Commerce Code we speak with Avinash Chukka, Vice President of Product at Cardlytics. Avinash spoke at the DCA Summit at Mastercard this November, so we are following up on that session to unpack some of his key points. We'll be talking about art vs. science in digital marketing, tactics to increase cardholder engagement through targeted offers, the marginal benefits of shaping cardholder spend by having better data on preferences, geo-fenced offers and more.

This week on Commerce Code we speak with Debby Lee, Senior Director of Partnerships at Cartera, A Rakuten Company. As a division of Rakuten, Cartera is the largest source of Shop & Earn offers in the U.S. and Canada. And as we found out in the interview, Rakuten means “optimism” in Japanese. Indeed it’s an optimistic episode this week as we’re talking about the consumer in 2024 and holiday shopping as we round out 2023. We hit:

• Changes in consumer behavior - “the great trade-down” to more affordable brands
• Persistent spending among affluent consumers
• How this impacts loyalty program planning and execution in the coming year, and finally
• a look at how Black Friday and Cyber Monday performed and what that may mean for the rest of holiday shopping this year.

This week on Commerce Code we speak with Jeff Mankoff, Founder & CEO of vPromos. We're talking about current challenges with the CLO ecosystem and business models, as well as process and technology simplification as a potential disruptor in CLO and fintech more broadly.

This week on Commerce Code we speak with Jeremy Frick, Amy Mullins and Natali Ryzhikova from BN, an Augeo Company. We're talking AI, humans, paid media and organic media.

Brand Networks describes itself as pioneers in AI-driven social technologies that revolutionize global audience engagement—empowering organizations to deliver unrivaled brand experiences through authentic, scalable solutions that define the social landscape through technology innovation.

We’re going to unpack that in the interview -

• What does that mean in practice?
• What’s the role for human expertise?
• Where does AI fit in?
• How does AI do things humans couldn’t do themselves?
• Where is it headed in the next few years?

• What the retail and payments spaces look like in Germany - how that's different from other markets like the UK and USA - and what that means for loyalty
• Some of the challenges of different data rules and places where there are opportunities to build out better rewards and offers by being smarter about how to use data

• Consumer preferences and discovery - are people still prioritizing experiences over things, and how does that change merchants' approach to the market?
• How do we create seamless experiences for consumers? and
• We'll get Jill's perspective on the future of offers and loyalty as someone who's worked with those programs in retail, banking and now at Mastercard.

• cash-back vs. points vs. other rewards
• debit cards, credit cards, and leather wallets
• how AI might help tailor offers, points and redemption paths for consumers - and
• fantasy football and what the word "football" means

This week on Commerce Code we speak with Rikard Bandebo from VantageScore and Christian Widhalm from Bloom Credit. We are talking about:

• Economic and social opportunity - how many thin file, no file and subprime consumers are there in the USA, why are there so many, and how does it impact them?
• Credit-building products - we’re seeing more companies offering products that are designed to help consumers build their credit - what’s driving that trend and what’s in it for companies?
• Credit data accuracy - how much of a problem is inaccurate credit data - and how can the system improve?

• Recent changes in identity verification – and what breakthroughs are ahead.
• Privacy, data ownership and consumer control – where we are now on these key digital I.D. issues, and where we’re headed.
• The role consumers play – how aware and bought in are they to the kinds of initiatives these two companies are undertaking now.

• Who's under-banked and un-banked - what's the size of that problem
• Barriers to getting better financial services and how tech innovation can make a difference
• How MoCaFi is approaching these challenges and some of the successes they've seen
• The future and their dreams for what this all looks like when they've accomplished MoCaFi's goals and start to set new ones

This week on Commerce Code we speak with Michelle Beyo, CEO & Founder of FINAVATOR. FINAVATOR is a Payments and Future of Finance Consultancy. We have an in-depth conversation with Michelle on open banking and discuss:

• Where consumers now stand on the issue of who owns their data - and who should.

• Where open banking is going - which parties are moving it forward, and which are holding it back.

• Which diversity and inclusion implications are part of this conversation.

This week on Commerce Code we speak with Rana Gujral, Chief Executive Officer of Behavioral Signals. Behavioral Signals is a company that facilitates A.I. mediated conversations to bridge the communication gap between humans and machines by introducing emotional intelligence. Topics of conversation include:

• How machines are able to understand human emotions – and change their behavior to match.

• How A.I. mediated conversations can impact outcomes of call-center conversations.

• Why companies are choosing to incorporate these sorts of interactions into their software solutions.

This week on Commerce Code we speak with Ed Wogan, Chief Merchant Officer at Valuedynamx, and Mitch Jacobs, Founder & CEO of Plink. Topics of conversation include:

• How F.I.s can maximize their data and digital banking infrastructure to provide relevant, daily value to credit union and banking customers.

• Why it's important to tie together a digital presence for local merchants who matter most to consumers.

• How this new capability impacts the competitive and collaborative dynamic between financial institutions and fintech companies.

This week on Commerce Code we speak with Erin Warren, General Manager of Rakuten's Card Linked Offer Network. We unpack the 2022 DCA Industry Study, a wide-reaching survey-based analysis of the state of digital commerce. Topics of conversation include:

• The past, present and future of card linked offers;

• The broader environment for marketing channels - who won and lost in 2022, and what does 2023 hold in store?

• And - the changing environment for consumer financial data ownership. How are advertisers and other players in the digital commerce ecosystem responding to changes underway, and the changes they expect in the near future?

This week on Commerce Code we speak with Tom Burgess, President of SnippMedia, to discuss the birth of Payments Media Networks. We will talk about digital media, restrictions on first party data, and an innovative approach to creating SKU-level offers to consumers.

Check out Snipp's recent blog post: Retail Media Networks for Banks? The definition of a Payments Media Network.

This week on Commerce Code, we speak with Ahmed Siddiqui, Chief Payments Officer at Branch, and learn more about what he terms "The Anatomy of the Swipe." Specifically he'll discuss teaching fintech to newcomers.

January 10, 2023: This week on Commerce Code, we speak with David True, Partner at PayGility Advisors, and learn more about the future of interchange in light of Amazon and Venmo’s recently announced partnership.

January 4, 2023: This week on Commerce Code, we're taking a look at 2023. It's a big year ahead for the world, the economy, and needless to say for digital commerce. Dan Currell, CEO of the Digital Commerce Alliance, runs down a short year in preview - with a few predictions in there.

December 29, 2022: This week on Commerce Code, it’s the year in review. Dan Currell, CEO of the Digital Commerce Alliance, covers four stories that didn't always lead the news, but we think were important in digital commerce.

This week on Commerce Code we speak with Ahmed Siddiqui, Chief Payments Officer at Branch, and learn more about transforming employee and contractor payments.

This week on Commerce Code, Dan Currell, CEO of the Digital Commerce Alliance, is talking economic and technological disruption - some quick reflections after last week's DCA Summit in Washington, DC.

This week on Commerce Code we speak with Shwetabh Gautam, Vice President of Financial Institutions at Harness FI. We’ll be learning more about how his organization is building tools and infrastructure to connect payments with purpose.

This week on Commerce Code we speak with Dave Passavant, Founder & CEO of Triple, which is a rewards and loyalty platform birthed out of Numo. Numo is PNC Bank’s fintech incubator subsidiary. Dave and Dan pick up some themes from his keynote presentation at the upcoming DCA Summit on Dec. 6th - in particular, they’re talking about how incumbent banks are responding to fintech challengers.