Highlights
- Fintech-Grade Infrastructure Built from the Ground Up: Designed an event-driven card-linked rewards platform that integrates direct payment network feeds and Plaid connectivity. This enables reliable transaction detection and automated cashback for both online and offline purchases.
- Real-Time Attribution Engine with Financial-Grade Accuracy: Developed a rules-based transaction processing pipeline that delivers sub-second reward attribution, exact-once processing, ledger integrity, and reliable payout readiness within 48 to 72 hours.
- Configurable Creator Incentive Architecture: Built a modular membership and reward engine that enables creators and brands to launch tier-based benefits, community incentives, and dynamic cashback models without altering the core fintech infrastructure.
Client
Our client is an early-stage fintech startup developing an omnichannel platform serving both B2B and B2C markets. The platform connects media engagement with purchase behavior through debit and credit cards, helping brands and media companies increase engagement by offering financial rewards as consumer incentives.
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Team Size: Product
The product is a fintech infrastructure that links consumer payment behavior with brand and media engagement. Using card-linked offer (CLO) technology and secure banking integrations through Plaid, the platform analyzes real-time transaction data to enable automatic cashback detection and accurate offer attribution for both online and offline purchases.
The product uses a membership-based model focused on creators, influencers, and fan communities. This way, the brands, which are platform customers, deliver targeted financial rewards and performance-driven incentives directly through users’ debit and credit cards.
Goals and objectives
- Enable brands and creators to monetize engagement into concrete purchase impact.
- Ensure users can link their own cards without friction and earn rewards automatically.
- Provide a backend equipped for real-time reward attribution based on consumer behavior.
- Support multiple reward structures to appeal to both casual fans and paid communities.
Challenges
- Cross-Channel Reward Infrastructure Complexity: Our team had to integrate the platform directly with payment networks to detect transactions from raw card data, normalize inconsistent merchant identifiers, and implement precise matching logic to prevent false positives, missed rewards, or incorrect attributions.
- Frictionless Automated Cashback Attribution: We needed to make the platform automatically detect qualifying transactions, validate eligibility, calculate dynamic reward structures, and trigger payouts without user intervention.
- Real-Time Fintech Data Scalability: We were tasked to implement event-driven processing to analyze continuous transaction streams, apply behavioral targeting logic, and attribute offers in near real time. For that, our engineers had to implement secure Plaid integration, perform data normalization, and build infrastructure for financial-grade performance and accuracy.
- Flexible Creator Incentive Architecture: Our engineers had to build a solution that supports multiple reward structures, creator-defined benefit rules, tier-based access controls, and community-based goals, while keeping an intuitive user experience.
Solution
Our team began the platform development by designing a solid fintech infrastructure layer. Our goal was to create a system where secure financial connectivity, transaction intelligence, and configurable incentives function as a unified ecosystem. The platform needed to categorize and activate users based on real purchase behavior to anchor incentives in real consumer activity.
The project began by laying a foundation for “deterministic truth” in a fragmented banking environment. It was necessary to guarantee that every cashback reward was triggered by verified transaction data. So, to make that possible, we designed a dual-track connectivity layer that integrates Plaid for OAuth-based credential sharing and direct Payment Network feeds for Card-Linked Offer (CLO) detection. This architecture supports the platform to capture and attribute both online and in-store transactions across partner merchants.
We prioritized security by using tokenized authentication flows, making sure that sensitive PII (Personally Identifiable Information) never enters the internal environment. This architectural decision reduces PCI-DSS compliance burdens and transforms the platform into a secure pass-through for financial data. The system maintains full authority over transaction records without the risk of storing underlying credentials.
As data began to flow, the challenge became interpreting the complexity of banking descriptors. Raw transaction strings are often cryptic. To address this, we developed an asynchronous, event-driven pipeline that translates these strings into usable data.
When a transaction enters the system, it starts a series of refinements. The data is first processed by a Merchant Resolution Engine, which removes metadata noise and maps the transaction to a verified brand. Next, a Rules-Based Attribution Engine evaluates the transaction, considering creator tiers, community milestones, and brand-specific exclusions, in sub-second time. The engine can run several reward models in parallel, including cashback for individuals, shared goals for groups, and community-based incentives.
To ensure financial integrity, the entire pipeline uses idempotent logic. We implemented this safeguard to guarantee that each individual transaction is processed exactly once, thereby preserving a synchronized and accurate ledger even in the face of network retries, duplicate events, or transaction reversals.
With the intelligence layer in place, our engineers implemented a structured reward lifecycle system to manage the transition from verified transaction to payout. This system applies strict eligibility checks and posting timelines, typically making cashback available within 48 to 72 hours of purchase. It also enforces payout thresholds, including minimum cashout requirements, to sustain operational efficiency and financial control.
On the user-facing side, the experience abstracts backend complexity. By connecting the frontend with real-time processing, our team eliminated the need for promo codes, redirects, or manual receipt uploads. Users benefit from an uninterrupted journey where card linking, reward activation, and earnings tracking are instantaneous and transparent.
As the platform matured, we added a membership-based layer that now defines the client’s business model. It allows creators and brands to set exclusive rates and tiered rewards without changing the core system. Since the financial core runs independently from the rewards setup, the platform can evolve its engagement features while keeping its foundation stable.
Our results
Thanks to our collaboration, the client launched a ready-to-use fintech platform that links real-world payments with digital engagement in real time. It works as a rewards engine built to handle more transactions, bring in new brands and creators, and adapt its incentive models easily as the business continues to grow.
We have established a long-term partnership with the client and plan to further expand the client’s market presence through enhanced social engagement, targeted marketing campaigns, and data-centric optimization initiatives.
Client Our client is VayaPin Solutions ApS, a prominent Danish company headquartered in Copenhagen. It specializes in software development...
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