Episode 187: Points as Programmable Currency

This week on Commerce Code, we are joined by Chrissy Maitland from Rakuten Card Linked Offers. Rakuten is one of the world's largest cash-back and rewards platforms, and the Rakuten Card Linked Offer Network powers card-linked offers for banks, fintechs and loyalty programs, giving merchants a performance-based sales channel in-store and online. Chrissy is General Manager of the Rakuten Card Linked Offer Network, and she is a returning guest on Commerce Code. We're talking about: Why "pure" agentic commerce may be further off than the headlines suggest, and why trust and identity are the bottleneck,How brands are actually showing up inside AI platforms today and what integrated AI advertising will look like, andWhy card-linked offers, riding on the trust that financial institutions already have, may be unusually well positioned for an agentic world.

This week on Commerce Code, we are joined by MB Bell and Eileen Peacock from Valuedynamx. Eileen is SVP and General Manager for the U.S., and she'll give us the strategic, industry-level view. MB Bell is Senior Director of Partnerships, and MB is going to bring it to life with the real client stories - the partnerships, the integrations, and the campaigns that are actually running. They have joined us to talk about: How loyalty has evolved from standalone programs into connected ecosystems;Why partnerships - and the right mix of them - have become the real competitive differentiator;How embedded commerce is reshaping the customer journey; andThe Valuedynamx story itself, including how the company brings the appeal of Apple products into loyalty programs to drive acquisition, engagement and redemption, and what it means to position Valuedynamx as a “Partner Connector Hub.”

This week on Commerce Code, we speak with Rikard Bandebo from VantageScore and Arvind Ronta from Pentadata. A little about the companies - VantageScore is a leading credit scoring company whose model is especially predictive because it uses new data sources that make it possible to provide credit scores to people even if they have limited credit history.Pentadata is a big reason VantageScore is able to do this. Pentadata is a financial data orchestration platform – which means its customers can access many different kinds of financial data through a single point of contact, or, in software terms, a single API.Rikard and Arvind have joined us to talk about:What’s making credit scores more accurate - things like rent and utility payments that are big predictors of consumer payment behavior, but which have been omitted from credit scoring until recently.What it takes to get new kinds of data like that into the credit scoring system - it’s not as easy as it looks!And what all of this means for the marketplace, from consumers to businesses.

This week on Commerce Code, we speak with Tim DeSoto, the CEO & Founder of Goodlife. Goodlife is an Intelligent Personal Shopping Companion that helps people save time, money, and effort while shopping.In today’s conversation, we are talking about:What the brand new Goodlife product does,Why he built it - and just as importantly,The AI tools he used to build it, and the AI capabilities Goodlife incorporates to dramatically improve the shopping experience for consumers.

This week on Commerce Code, we speak with Mark Lesiw, Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer 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 how he recently used AI tools to build a sophisticated customer loyalty app from start to finish in about 40 hours – the kind of thing that used to take months. It’s a sort of experimental rocket, not something that replaces Olive’s current technology. But this rocket flies, and it shows what’s possible.

This week on Commerce Code, we speak with Keith Smith, Chief Executive Officer of Payouts Network. Payouts Network’s PayNow Platform executes instant payouts, digital credits, and pay with points - and as the name suggests, PayNow executes immediately. Today, we talk with Keith about Points as Programmable Currency. We have lived in a long period in which people, Americans especially, never questioned or even really thought much about what currency is, how it works or whether it might change. A big-picture view suggests that currency can be lots of things - and it’s not ridiculous to think that the next step in currency evolution could come out of the points/rewards/loyalty landscape.

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 186AThis 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 2025The importance of value to consumers nowWhat that looks like in light of a very fast-moving political and economic situation globallyWhat merchants, financial services companies and other digital commerce professionals need to do to adapt and grow during what is already a complicated year