Cardlytics

Cardlytics

Cardlytics, founded in 2008 by a group of former bankers, pioneered the card-linked offers industry. The company is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, and is publicly traded under the ticker CDLX on Nasdaq. Its founders saw the power of purchase data locked inside financial institutions and designed a bank-friendly, privacy-safe platform to unlock it for marketing. The firm operates a commerce media platform that uses first-party transaction data from partner financial institutions to target, engage, and measure ad campaigns down to individual purchases — it calls this Purchase Intelligence. Asset classes include digital advertising, consumer insights, loyalty rewards, and closed-loop measurement. The platform spans both the US and UK, claiming visibility into half of all card swipes in the US and a quarter in the UK. Confirmed clients include Marriott Hotels, Sky TV, Clarks, and Saatva (per the firm, 2025). The platform reported over $46B in measurable sales delivered and $1B in customer rewards paid. The company has over 215 million monthly active users and processes roughly $5.8T in annual consumer spend (as of Dec 31, 2024). In August 2024, Amit Gupta, formerly COO and GM of Bridg, was appointed CEO. David Evans returned as CFO in January 2026 after a prior tenure at the firm from 2014 to 2020. Cardlytics has also built a research arm, publishing reports such as the "Banking Loyalty Index 2026" and "State of Spend" analysis. Cardlytics’ structural differentiator is its closed-loop measurement — it can tie ad spend directly to in-store and online transactions. This gives advertisers penny-level attribution that traditional digital ad platforms cannot match. The company is not a family office or asset manager but a publicly traded technology firm operating an ad network underpinned by bank data.