‘Adding Betterment, we’re targeting 200 million Powered By customers by the end of 2021’: Dosh’s Ryan Wuerch
- Challenger banks are increasingly adding rewards programs to their debit and credit card offerings.
- Dosh, a shopping app that provides cashback on purchases, has teamed up with challenger bank, Betterment.
As challenger banks expand their capabilities, many with debit and credit card offerings are adding in rewards as a way to attract, retain, and engage their customers. These upstarts frequently turn to partners for their rewards programs.
Fintech firm Dosh gives millions of users cashback when they shop at top retailers that are using cash back as an acquisition tool.
Merchants use Dosh to acquire new customers. Brands like Instacart and Dunkin use the consumer shopping app as a transaction-based, new form of advertising. Instead of hard to analyze radio, TV, and out of home campaigns, Dosh gives merchants the ability to make cash offers to get new people shopping in their stores or online. This way, they know exactly how much it costs to acquire a new customers.
Dosh recently announced a major expansion of its platform, launching with Venmo and Jelli as its first official partners. With Powered by Dosh, financial services companies can provide automatic, instant, card-linked cash back experiences for their users.
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The following excerpts were edited for clarity.
At the end of 2019, PayPal, a significant investor in Dosh, launched an integration with the firm. Venmo users can access the Dosh cashback experience inside the Venmo app, giving them access to thousands of merchants. Since that launch, Dosh has seen growing interest from other financial services firms looking to integrate rewards into their credit and debt card programs.
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"Since that time, we have taken the Dosh SDK that we created and delivered that directly to financial institutions and neobanks so they can deliver a rich cashback experience to their millions of consumers -- whether they utilize digital payment methods or credit cards or debit cards," said Ryan Wuerch, CEO and founder of Dosh.
Now, the fintech firm has signed a partnership with Betterment. With Dosh’s cashback experience fully integrated into the Betterment Debit Card, Betterment will offer its Checking users a seamless rewards program with offers from thousands of merchants.
"Whether it's Walmart or Burger King, cashback will automatically be delivered to Betterment debit cardholders without them having to do anything," he said. "They'll receive anywhere from two to three percent up to 10% or more cashback on a purchase or transaction."
After building its consumer app, Dosh has found an additional growth avenue as a rewards platform by partnering with challenger banks and payment companies. To do this, the company has evolved its product, technology stack, and teams.
The company has evolved from its early days when it had its engineers working on partner integrations. Dosh now has strategic partnerships and merchant integration teams that onboard merchants.
"We've strengthened data science, we've strengthened engineering, we've strengthened product to let that flow to the benefit of each of the partners that we're working with," Wuerch said. "Our partners are looking to be top of wallet and top of mind with their customers, so they want to create better engagement and better utilization of their products and services."
Dosh makes money by charging its merchants a marketing fee. The majority of that fee is added to the cashback a customer receives, while Dosh pockets the rest, according to Wuerch. When there's a partner involved, like Betterment, those fees are split with the partner.
For now, Dosh plans to continue to build out its consumer and platform offerings concurrently. But is is Powered by Dosh that has the largest potential for growth.
"I'll put it in perspective: we are targeting approximately 200 million consumers through our Powered by Dosh relationships by the end of 2021," Weurch said.