Last month I highlighted several startups helping put Boston on the map for the future of payments, one of which was Clovr Media, a company that will forever change how you redeem offers at merchants. I finally had the opportunity to speak with their founder and CEO Tom Burgess to learn more about the company, which is about ready to close their Series A round and launch with some of the nation’s largest retailers this Spring.

Clovr is working to make it actually enjoyable for you and I to redeem offers (read: no more mail-in rebates, flashing loyalty cards, check-ins, tricky gimmicks, coupons, entering codes online, or otherwise required). The company has created a platform that links any ad (banner, text, video, mobile, and even print thanks to next-gen barcodes) directly to your bank statement. All you have to do is click the offer, and after you make the purchase, Clovr routes the savings automatically to your card.

Prior to Clovr’s platform, you probably received a lot of offers directly from your bank, perhaps appended and included with your card statement every month. If you wanted to redeem the offer, you would have to login to a section of your bank, type in a unique code, and then when you used that particular card the savings would be deducted. That bank worked with brands to cut these deals, and it all happened for the most part within the walled-garden of the bank.

Clovr is the first company to bring these card-linked offers outside the individual banks’ relationships, opening card-linked offers up to any advertiser.

“The concept is that every ad and offer should be linked to a card. We watched all the activity around it in late 2009 and early 2010, but we observed that it was all happening internally within the bank,” explained Burgess, speaking to Clovr’s beginnings. He embarked on a digital media and payments play with reach and scale – one that will completely disrupt and bypass this walled garden approach.

A Solution That Incentivizes All Stakeholders to the Platform

Key to Clovr is how easy the platform is to adopt for all players to the platform: financial institutions, advertisers, and consumers alike.

Financial institutions, which issue credit and debit cards to customers want to make sure their card is “top of wallet” for you.

If offers are seamlessly linked to said bank’s cards thanks to Clovr, you are incentivized to use that card over any others. What’s more, any advertiser now has access to the card-linked offers thanks to Clovr, not just the retailers working directly with each bank.

For advertisers, the other party to the Clovr platform, Clovr bridges the gap between card loyalty and digital advertising, and does so in a way that requires no change of processes on behalf of the financial institution or advertiser (and, again, no heavy lifting or real change in behavior on behalf of the consumer).

For you and I, all we have to do is opt-in to Clovr when we redeem an offer they are behind. They tokenize this information – meaning they’ll never keep your card number or account information on hand, instead assigning a unique identifier – to minimize any security concerns and make your next redemption even more seamless.

Getting Clovr Off the Ground

In exploring the opportunity, Burgess initially went to the digital media world: the Facebooks, ad networks, and big retailers who he observed flocking to card-linked offers on their websites, in their email marketing, and through their other digital outlets. These players recognized the value, and Burgess watched adoption grow, crafting a solution that would make the process more seamless.

Burgess knew the success of his solution depended on integration happening on the digital media side, not the payments side. “An advertiser goes to Facebook, an ad network, or even someone who is going to run a email campaign through Constant Contact – and we want to integrate right there. When those advertisers go to run a campaign, we want it to be seamless for them to simply say ‘we want this offer card-enabled,” explained Burgess.

His next challenge was working with the financial institutions to gain access to individual card transactions. As many payments veterans know, doing this on a bank-by-bank basis would take forever and be extraordinarily costly. Instead, Burgess and his team turned to transaction aggregators like Yodlee and the payment processors like First Data Corp. – entities that sit between a merchant’s bank (the ‘acquiring bank’ in payment speak) and the consumer’s bank (the ‘issuing bank’ in payment speak). These processors make sure you are who you say you are upon card swipe, provide anti-fraud measures, and help move your funds between banks. In doing so, Clovr quickly gained access to card transaction data and now has 99 percent of cardholders in the US all set to benefit from card linked offers.

“If someone sees an offer for $50 off $500 at Lowe’s for instance, they click the ad to redeem. We know they clicked, and then we monitor their transaction spending and apply savings directly down to the consumers account over ACH when they make the purchase.” Read: Clovr Media does all the heavy lifting. All a merchant needs to do is fund the campaign.

What to Expect When Clovr Launches – and A Patent that Will Open New Doors

Currently, Clovr is working directly with (big name, national) retailers and brands, but going forward the company’s goal is to educate ad networks so Clovr just needs to focus on ensuring everything happens smoothly on the backend.

“Our goal for the next 18-20 months is to educate ad networks. We’re launching in April with campaigns that will be merchant focused – right on their website, Facebook page, and these things. Quickly thereafter we will launch banner ad campaigns targetted through the different ad networks. Then, we will move into traditional circulars using QR codes and Zoove’s star codes,” explained Burgess of his plans moving forward.

Alongside this work for distribution, Clovr is working to move beyond merchant-specific offers, to individual item specific offers at merchants. Currently, there is no way to do this: when a bank sees a transaction hit a card, they know the bulk amount, but they do not know the exact items you bought. Clovr has a patent around this piece of the payments puzzle, and they will soon be able to offer SKU level targeting to brands and advertisers.

To learn more about Clovr Media, check out their page and visit their website.