Tandym
Helping small businesses inspire big loyalty
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veryone’s had this conversation. You’re out to dinner with friends, and someone offers to put it on their card so they can get the points. “Oh, you should get this card,” they gush. “I get so much money back.” Who’s funding those rewards? Small businesses are. Payment processing costs, credit card fees, and customer rewards are disproportionately borne by small and midsize companies. If you buy something on your card, that gives you 3% back; that 3% is being paid by the merchant. Nearly all large retailers have a private label credit card and loyalty program. Historically, these cards were available only to businesses with a billion-plus dollars in revenue. That’s because the cost to set up one of these programs is gargantuan. Six issuing banks in the U.S. issue private label cards, all of which have been around since before the internet existed. Getting a program through one of these banks involves
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a process lasting nine to 12 months with large amounts of manual coding in software languages as obsolete as the hardware they’re running on. Tandym has a better way. They issue private label cards directly to businesses, with a setup time of about 30 minutes. They charge them half a percent to process the payment. The merchant uses the rest to fund their rewards program. It’s a redistribution of wealth back to the merchant and their customers, and they can reward their customers for shopping with them, just like Amazon or Target. U.S. merchants spend around $100 billion annually to process customer payments. Half of that funding goes to funding the rewards programs of big banks. Merchants on Tandym’s payment network see an 80% reduction in payment processing fees, which they can use to fund their own rewards programs instead.