CardLinx Association

The CardLinx Association, is a non-profit industry association founded in 2013 and based out of San Bruno, California. Facebook, MasterCard, Bank of America and Microsoft are some of the founding members. It promotes the growth of online to offline commerce and the card-linked industry. The association fosters cross-industry collaboration, developing industry services and instituting common standards such as standardized consumer and merchant consents, standardized advertisement and offer insertion orders, and standardized syndication agreements for advertisers and consumers. Member companies include banks, payment networks and processors, large digital publishers and large merchants.

Overview

CardLinx is led by founding President and CEO Silvio Tavares. Tavares is a former senior executive from Visa and First Data. Its current association members include Airbnb, American Express, Bank of America, Chevron, Discover, Facebook, HILTON Worldwide, Mastercard, Microsoft, Rakuten, Samsung, Yahoo! Japan, UBS and more.

As opposed to traditional rewards and loyalty programs that use phone numbers and loyalty cards, card-linking allows consumers to link their payment card to a mobile app or digital loyalty program and immediately receive their discount or loyalty reward by paying with the linked payment card.

In 2017, a survey of large merchants, payment processors, digital publisher, and card-linked technology firms, such as CardLinx Association members Facebook, Microsoft, Samsung, Whole Foods Market, Sears, and more, showed at least 50 percent growth in card-linking over 12 months for over 80 percent of survey participants. The CardLinx Association, having established card-linking’s success in the United States, is expanding card-linking in other developed economies, such as Germany, Japan, UK and Switzerland.