MasterCard Buys Truaxis

• MasterCard acquires California-based Truaxis (ex-BillShrink), service provider specialising in card reward offers among other sectors.

• Truaxis’s platform will be integrated in MasterCard’s network ensuring real-time offers and advanced analytic tools to craft more diversified offers for cardholder, provide more efficiency to merchants (targeted services) and improve customer loyalty for banks.

• Truaxis for instance proposes a platform designed for campaign creation and management, advanced customisation features, a flexible architecture (making implementation easier for banks) and tracking and analysis tools.

• For Truaxis, this buyout stands as a growth opportunity. The two players are planning to build an innovative card-based redemption model in the coming months.

Source: MasterCard press release

• From a strategic point of view, MasterCard intends to meet the expectations of its cardholders, explicitly tired of receiving irrelevant discounts in their mail, and requiring more personalised and scalable offers in line with their everyday lives. Banks and merchants should be able to improve their approach to customer rewards, set up links with them, while facing today’s overall popular offers through designing innovative solutions too (coupons, daily deals and other customers rewards). Banks and card networks are now challenged in their enterprise to improve their skills in analysing customer data opened to potentially significant financial gains.

• Billshrink was created in 2008 and originally proposed a mobile comparison offer, later extended to other services (including payment cards, savings accounts, etc.). Building on this expertise, it started diversifying in September 2011 with customisation, targeting and loyalty services and then changed name for Truaxis. The start-up has managed to raise nine million dollars since its launch.