Retailers and Agencies Endorse Transaction-Enabled Marketing Expert Affinity Solutions' Enhancements to Its Industry-Leading Data and Analytics Platform

NEW YORK --(Business Wire)--

Affinity Solutions (Affinity; www.affinitysolutions.com), the leader in card-linked offers and transaction-enabled marketing programs in the U.S., today announced it has enhanced its industry-best data and analytics platform to deliver richer, more secure, and better targeted offers to customers of the nation's most prominent brands, including banks, retailers, insurance carriers, and media companies, while maintaining the highest standards of consumer privacy.

The first enhancement is the implementation of "Big Data" capabilities applied to card-linked offers. This enables automated, privacy-controlled matching of payment, customer relationship management (CRM), demographic, psychographic, and behavioral data to create significant improvements in efficiency and return on marketing investments. Affinity's platform is now able to leverage a broad range of data sets, including the retailer's own data, with a much greater ability to determine that a customer is "in market" and ready to buy a given marketer's product or service. Affinity is then able to reliably measure and validate the effectiveness of a marketer's card-linked offer campaign to determine incremental performance. At present, high-profile national retailers such as Kohl's Corporation (NYSE: KSS), 1-800-FLOWERS.com (NASDAQ: FLWS), and AutoZone (NYSE: AZO).

The second enhancement is the ability for Affinity to leverage its proprietary analytics for non-bank populations. As a result, Affinity has extended its marketable universe to tens of millions of consumers on behalf of clients in the insurance, entertainment, education and retail industries. These include Hearst, Sony, GEICO, Caesars Entertainment, and University of Phoenix.

"Leveraging a range of data sets allows us to identify connections that sheds light on a customer's readiness to buy," said Nipun Palekar, vice president of analytics and strategy at Affinity Solutions, and an analytics executive with over 15 years of data modeling experience at large financial services organizations. "Our analytics capabilities are a unique combination of art and science that helps our bank, retail, and consumer brand partners drive their business."

Affinity's data and analytics services incorporate privacy and security measures using anonymized data to generate offers for brands. This data is filtered through numerous layers of high-grade data encryption to ensure consumer privacy protection.

The improved platform, endorsed by thousands of retailers and agencies within the company's network of clients, supports standards for card-linked offers and transaction-enabled marketing that Affinity recently developed with a consortium of leading retailers and marketing agencies. By working with Affinity, and leveraging the company's more sophisticated data and analytics capabilities, both retailers and agencies can now glean real-time insights on consumer purchasing behavior to make more informed marketing decisions, including best approaches for optimizing advertising campaigns, merchandise mix, and customer relationship management initiatives.

About Affinity Solutions

Affinity Solutions is the industry leader in card-linked offers and transaction-enabled marketing. Affinity Solutions leverages proprietary analytics, applied to a range of customer data in a privacy-controlled environment, to deliver the right offer to the right consumer at the right time and through the right channel, for its bank and retailer partners. Affinity Solutions has partnerships with nearly 4,000 national and regional banks, as well as over 25,000 brick-and-mortar retail partners. Its innovative programs incorporate experiential benefits that delight and entertain customers before, during and after they shop, to drive deeper customer relationships for their partners. For more information, please visit www.affinitysolutions.com, or follow the company on Twitter (News - Alert) at @AffinitySolutns.