About Currency Alliance

Currency Alliance began in 2015 with a question:

"How can loyalty programs thrive if most customers only make a few purchases per year?"

This was the 'eureka' moment for founder & CEO Chuck Ehredt, who had spent 30 years as an entrepreneur in banking, fintech and other industries before founding Currency Alliance.

The answer was enabling complementary brands to create loyalty partnerships, so that together, they could increase customers’ frequency of earning, redeeming, or exchanging points/miles.

In truth, such partnerships have existed for decades, but setting up those partnerships took a great deal of time - with many indirect costs. The company’s mission was therefore to get the cost of collaboration as close to zero as possible, so all stakeholders could benefit from such partnerships.

Chuck then set about assembling a team comprising experts in marketing, software engineering, finance and business development, to build a world-leading solution for loyalty partnerships, based on modern technology design principles.

Since then, the company has grown rapidly, enabling more productive, lower-cost loyalty marketing for hundreds of brands worldwide in travel, retail, hospitality, banking and more.

Since the 1990s, brands have been deploying loyalty solutions and forming loyalty partnerships to engage more customers, because they knew that only a small percentage of customers spend enough with one brand to earn enough loyalty value to get to interesting rewards.

This initially took place via the earliest loyalty coalitions, in which a third-party marketing company owned the technology and dominated the ecosystem. Air Miles was the first and best-known example.

At first, these coalitions worked - to the extent that they engaged more customers. But the coalition operator traditionally siphoned off 30-50% of the value.

Brands have since attempted to take this 'in-house' – but without really solving the problem. The challenge that brands encountered was that...

... integrating their respective loyalty platforms was so expensive, and took so long, that these efforts continued to drain value from the ecosystem.

Ultimately, this impaired brands' abilities to incentivize customers and earn customer loyalty – and brands continuing to attempt these hardcoded integrations face the same friction today.

Read our article on the evolution of the loyalty coalition model.