Making Cashback Frictionless with Alex Short, PerformID

Michelle Lomas: Hey there, hustlers. Welcome back to another episode of Flex Your Hustle. I'm Michelle Lomas, and this week we're bringing you a special episode where we profile some of the most exciting publishers making waves in affiliate marketing.

Michelle Lomas: Today I'm joined in the studio by Alex Short, the founder of PerformID, one of the most innovative startups in the cashback game that you've probably never heard of.

Michelle Lomas: Born off an idea that cashback should be frictionless, PerformID is the full service solution behind the award-winning cashback program for American Express's Global Rewards Program. Alex founded PerformID to make it easier for customers to receive their rewards and use them faster. Listen on as Alex shares the PerformID story.

Michelle Lomas: Alex, thank you so much for joining us today. We're gonna talk a little bit about PerformID, which will be very interesting for some of the listeners cuz they've potentially never heard of you. You're a bit, a bit of a white label solution.

Alex Short: Michelle, thank you so much for inviting us in and for Commission Factory for being so supportive because we're always kind of lurking in the background of doing technology rather than being in the forefront.

Alex Short: So I'm the founder at PerformID. And what PerformID does is we, uh, remove the friction that exists between large financial institutions and affiliate partners and merchants. So we build technology that enables a sort of front end loyalty platform for customers to come on and earn affiliate powered rewards.

Alex Short: So we're kind of like a full service technology, partnerships and customer service. We're probably best known in this market for My Amex Shop, which launched in February with American Express and that's been a pretty good so far. But we've been live for three years in Korea with uh, Shinhan and American Express.

Alex Short: And Shinhan is the largest national bank over in Korea. That's been a pretty big success, and I think we're kind of modeling the success we had in that market here in Australia with our recent launch.

Michelle Lomas: Mm-hmm. So we'll dive into a little bit more to explain exactly what that means.

Alex Short: Sure.

Michelle Lomas: Because it took me a little while.

Michelle Lomas: I do wanna say a little congratulations.

Alex Short: Thank you

Michelle Lomas: For a company so young, you've recently won a few awards, which is great.

Alex Short: Yeah, it's been wild. I think, the Global Performance Marketing Awards last year, I'm sure there were a few people sort of scratching their heads of like, who's this startup winning awards?

Alex Short: Uh, but we won best loyalty partnership globally, which was obviously massive for us as well as the best affiliate strategy in APAC. So to take those home is a big confidence boost.

Michelle Lomas: Huge. Huge.

Alex Short: Thank you.

Michelle Lomas: If you could kind of do a 101 and explain what you do in very simple terms, cuz that's what I kind of needed when we first met.

Michelle Lomas: Because you're a bit of a white label solution, right?

Alex Short: Correct.

Michelle Lomas: So people might actually be familiar with you but they don't realize it is you.

Alex Short: That's correct. We're we're that tiny little logo in the bottom of loyalty platforms that says Powered by PerformID. You know, there are a lot of problems that exist with banks and working with affiliate.

Alex Short: There's a lot of red tape where they just can't work with external tracking parties. And so the solution that we created for the banks was to say, Hey, we'll be the middle man. We'll build the platform, we'll house all of the offers. Um, just like another loyalty or a cashback player or perhaps maybe airline loyalty reward, we have that front end where all of the stores are displayed, a customer comes in and syncs their credit card on the site, and then they'll earn, um, almost instant rewards back to their card that they've synced with us.

Alex Short: So, very simple concept. The problems we solve for the banks are obviously cutting through the red tape and then taking the risk on board on our end for the merchants.

Alex Short: Now, card-linked offers can be wholly attributed on affiliate tracking. And then for the customers, it's no longer waiting 60 to 90 days for your rewards. It's let's get those rewards straight away and have a more meaningful reward straight back to the card that you used.

Michelle Lomas: Mm-hmm.

Michelle Lomas: Yeah. I do love that idea that I don't have to wait and then it sits an account and then I have to extract it and put it into my account, and then I wait again.

Michelle Lomas: It's just goes immediately on there. So you can just continue to benefit from that without even really thinking about it.

Michelle Lomas: Right?

Alex Short: Exactly. We wanted to remove all the barriers of friction that exist in there and, and what we kept hearing was that the customers themselves. I heard on some of your recent podcasts talking about the troubles of how do we educate customers in what is cash back, right?

Alex Short: But you know, we don't classify ourselves as cash back as such, it's more credit back.

Michelle Lomas: Ooh, credit back. Yeah. Ooh, you've coined a new term there. I like that.

Alex Short: Yeah. You're not getting cash into your account, you're just netting it off your invoice. But the whole purpose there is for you to earn it without even having to think and smoothing out the whole process for you as an end user.

Michelle Lomas: Yeah, it feels very forward thinking, considering consumers are just getting their head around cash back at the moment. But it does require you to always be aware of cash back. I've got to go into the app first, or I've got to click that little button on my browser, which it's not hard, but you can forget a lot.

Alex Short: Easily.

Michelle Lomas: Easily. I've done it so many times. Whereas this obviously makes it a lot simpler and smoother.

Alex Short: Yeah, for sure.

Michelle Lomas: And a consumer doesn't even have to think about it.

Alex Short: Beyond that as well. The consumer might not understand what, you know, perhaps maybe a cashback or loyalty site does, but when they know it's aligned with their payment provider a customer can easily understand, hey, there's a financial relationship between a merchant and my banking provider, so I can understand that the ability to cut me a reward exists. Right. As opposed to maybe a loyalty platform where you might sign up and you say, Hey, like this seems a bit scammy. I don't really know where these loyalty sites are getting their commissions from.

Alex Short: Um, and I think the alignment with banking or financial institutions really hammers down that point of customers finding it easy to understand that exists. I can deserve a reward. I can earn that, and maybe my bank pays for that.

Michelle Lomas: Yeah, it's really great. It's really just breaking down that friction. Right?

Alex Short: Correct.

Michelle Lomas: You've obviously won a bit of an award with your work that you've been doing with Amex. Why don't you share a little bit about what you do there and what makes that program so special?

Alex Short: Obviously it hats off to our friends at Amex. They've been incredible, the brand that they operate, you know, Amex is known for being premium.

Alex Short: And when you think about what do merchants today want? They want typically high spenders, they want people who earn enough money to be repeat spenders. They want people maybe that aren't necessarily too focused on discounting, but might enjoy a reward. Um, and so the Amex branding, I think, aligns so well with the product of what we want to do and also what merchants want.

Alex Short: So when we negotiate with merchants, we're often able to negotiate really strong rates because we say, Hey look, these are fee paying customers who pay, you know, a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars per from card membership each year. And so they're investing in something and expect something back.

Alex Short: And merchants can say like, Hey, you know, aligning ourselves with. The world's most premium loyalty platform or loyalty offering, being Amex, is such a good brand alignment, particularly when it comes to luxury.

Michelle Lomas: Mm, it's so true. I think cashback or credit back can often be seen as something that's just like deep performance, and I agree from that perspective.

Michelle Lomas: You know, if you're aligning with a brand like Amex, easily the most prestigious credit card company in the world, you are kind of leveraging a bit of that brand power. Right. What sort of brands do you generally have on the Amex program?

Alex Short: You know, a lot of brands would probably work with My Amex Shop just because they know, um, that it won't affect their brands.

Alex Short: A lot of luxury players like Net-a-Porter or Farfetch, you know, these kind of like multi fashion luxury retailers are super keen on it. Also, quite a few, like smaller mono brands and sell direct on their own site, they might be willing to work with us and to incentivise the audience to help drive their prices lower than what other people are reselling their products at.

Alex Short: So I suppose providing the discount to the audiences through our channel enables them to give a kind of like, Hey, the bank is discounting it, not us, but it keeps our brand looking really expensive and premium.

Michelle Lomas: Mm-hmm. Because you can get access to all those great brands and, and retailers.

Alex Short: A hundred percent.

Michelle Lomas: How can brands work with you guys? Because you're kind of a B2B and a B2C, I think. So what's the best way that people can engage with you guys?

Alex Short: Yeah, that's a good synopsis. I'd say we're B2B to C, which makes it even more complicated. But yeah, the brands themselves, you know, working through Commission Factory, working on their affiliate tracking.

Alex Short: It's very easy for them to just enable extending an offer. You know, we usually accept the main terms of their programs, which is nice and easy, rather than sort of lengthy contracts of working with banks in the past. We cut down those walls and we say, Hey, it's a click to accept. We'll accept your terms and you just need to send us a little bit of creative, um, let us know a little bit about the brand and we'll create a profile page and start giving you exposure straight away.

Michelle Lomas: Great.

Alex Short: The only other thing obviously is you need to take Amex.

Michelle Lomas: Yep.

Michelle Lomas: Okay. Fair enough. Fair enough.

Michelle Lomas: The Flex Your Hustle Podcast is made possible by the team at Commission Factory. Commission Factory is the largest performance and partner marketing network in Asia Pacific. Pairing tens of thousands of meaningful and scalable partnerships.

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Michelle Lomas: Do you have some examples I guess, that you could share with the listeners in terms of some of the brands and the success that they've seen with you guys?

Alex Short: For sure. The award that we won in the GPMA awards, um, that was surrounding a French luxury brand.

Alex Short: That case study encapsulated a partnership between the National Bank Shehan K-Pop band, who was also the they were the brand ambassadors for this French luxury brand. And so we are sort of like a four-way partnership of, you know, how do we incentivise the customers who use this certain K-pop branded credit card from the National Bank.

Alex Short: Uh, where the brand is aligned with the boy band and then how do we incentivise their customers to also wear the products the boy band is wearing. So it was a very innovative campaign. And then obviously did us well.

Michelle Lomas: There's so many elements to that. It's tapping into culture, building brand, tapping into that desire for buying collectible clothing, as well as obviously tapping to the performance side of it.

Michelle Lomas: So no wonder you won an award for that, sounds very innovative in terms of how you are using it in different ways.

Alex Short: Yeah. Uh, it does help obviously being aligned with banks and American Express that their marketing budgets turn into, you know, wild dreams that a startup could never do themselves. So definitely it's nice to play in that a little bit.

Michelle Lomas: Yeah. Great. I heard you did some really great work with My Muscle Chef as well, who we've had on the show. We had Ashley on the show. She's fantastic. Still one of our most listened to episodes actually. So, uh, what did you do there?

Alex Short: Asides from all the test orders that we've been having in the office, I think we're all completely full of My Muscle Chef.

Michelle Lomas: Yep.

Alex Short: Uh, we're we're big fans, so, um, yeah, we, we do this type of promotion whereby once a month we give an exclusive homepage takeover for a merchant of the month or store of the month we call it. And my muscle chef came straight out of the gates and saying, Hey, you know, we're, we're keen to participate.

Alex Short: Let us into all of your promotions. Um, you know, we really like this, this platform. And so immediately we were like, Hey, you guys can join. They just gave us an upsize to be a part of this homepage takeover. They had their own sort of, Store of the month, landing page giving, sort of introducing the brand to, to all of the new customers.

Alex Short: And it was, it was a great success. I think. It's the first time we've ever been able to work in food and beverage. So we weren't sure how it was gonna go. Mm-hmm. But the strength of their brand combined with the Amex audience, I think, you know, we had a lot of hungry customers.

Michelle Lomas: Huge fan of that team. Huge fan of Ashley. She's an incredibly intelligent woman, but the way that they run their entire business through data and affiliate marketing is like their strongest channel. Obviously they've partnered with you for a reason because, you know, they don't, they don't partner with anyone unless they're seeing the success.

Michelle Lomas: That sounds fantastic and glad to hear that it's working for them.

Alex Short: Hats off to them in, in understanding the value of an affiliate partner in this case, because they didn't pay for just new users, they also put a lower commission rate for existing customers.

Michelle Lomas: Fantastic.

Alex Short: And you know, especially when you work with a bank or a closed loop loyalty, uh, customer base, you know that you're borrowing a customer base rather than acquiring.

Alex Short: I think it's really important for merchants to kind of understand that when you tap into those audience sizes, you need to commission on the other customers that might've already purchased. Just because you know that you're aligning yourself with that brand, you know that you're going to have that customer repeat to you, whereas they might have been with a competitor to you otherwise.

Michelle Lomas: Yeah. Yeah. Credit to them. Definitely. They're a fantastic company. Um, so I wanna take a little bit of a step back. How'd you get started? What's the story?

Alex Short: Oh, the story's a long one actually. I, um, I'll try and cut it down for the podcast, but, I used to actually teach English over in Korea before I moved here and then after that, you know, it was a GFC at home, I was like, where am I gonna go? I came down to Sydney cuz my brother was here. And I got a job at a service office space and one of the clients in there was an affiliate network. I was like, ah, what, what is it that you guys do? Like I, I'm, I'm really interested.

Alex Short: You're always so happy. And then I was like, you know, you guys are moving out. Please take, take, take me with you. Um, and they did. And then from there I was looking after MasterCard Traveler Rewards, Amex, uh, Visa. So I got so much exposure to all of these. Um, card-linked offers, but I also got to listen to the problems that they were having.

Alex Short: And there are multiple in, in the card-linked space. I know card link's very topical at the moment, particularly in the online space. You know, it's hard if you're not using affiliate links because things can often sort of stack up on top of each other and merchants end up paying a little bit too much.

Alex Short: So we were like, how do we solve the problem for the merchants? How do we solve the problem for the banks? And that's how PerformID was born. It was also, Uh, pretty timely that Covid came around because everything went online. We were like, Hey, we've got online tracking. We can do it.

Michelle Lomas: Great. And you've just grown very quickly over the last few years. What do you think is the future of cash back or credit back?

Alex Short: The future is definitely more instant. I think that there's so much friction that exists with this 60 to 90 day delay for customers. So solving the problem for the customers is reducing that friction and even coming to the point where we no longer need a click, I think how good would it be to just go on and, and link your card and then shop anywhere knowing that you're gonna get these rewards and card linking does that a little bit in itself.

Alex Short: But the technology that we're using in the affiliate space is using, uh, last click attribution. So that solves the problem for the merchants because the merchants want everything to be attributable. And they wanna see, you know, is that customer new and existing Cardlink offers as they stand at the moment, don't really have the ability to do things like SKU offers.

Alex Short: So, you know, as a merchant, perhaps you might have a pair of shoes and a pair of jeans. And the pair of shoes you only have a 1% margin on, but the jeans you've got 20% margin on. So what we can do is now, instead of it being sort of a flat percentage across all products, is we're using Commission Factory's tracking in order to enable us to have SKU level offers.

Alex Short: Um, and, you know, full price versus existing or minimum spend thresholds. There's a lot of interesting things we can do using affiliate tracking to solve the issues for the merchants as well.

Michelle Lomas: And that is available to brands now if they wanna work with you.

Alex Short: Oh, a hundred percent. Yeah. We do it. We do it automatically. Yeah.

Michelle Lomas: Great. Good for them to know that.

Alex Short: Yeah.

Michelle Lomas: Um, and my last question for you is, you know, if anybody listening is interested, then maybe they're in the cashback space or they're looking to get into it. What advice do you have for them?

Alex Short: Persistency, I think, it's a hard space to get into, but you know, the reason we developed into who we are is because we solved a problem.

Alex Short: I'd say you could say that about any business, right? Solve a problem and build it, and they'll come, right. As long as you're fixing something. People are gonna need it and find a corner of the card linking or the cash back space and fix that problem. Make it easier for people and people will adopt it.

Michelle Lomas: Yeah. Great.

Alex Short: Yeah. PerformID wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the partners that we have around us. Yeah. And kind of in a way we're all on a boat, um, and everybody has an oar and we think like Amex has a few oars and they're rowing hard and we've got Commission Factory with another oar, and we've got the merchants rowing their oars.

Alex Short: Um, and I just don't think we would be here without any of those partners. And, I just wanna say a huge shout out to all of them because, you know, everybody has gone above and beyond to make sure this is gonna be possible. Um, and of course our team are are really kick ass.

Michelle Lomas: Beautiful.

Alex Short: Thank you.

Michelle Lomas: Thank you, Alex. This has really been very informative and of course if anyone's interested to work with you, they can reach out to the Commission Factory team.

Alex Short: Fantastic. Thank you so much for having me on.

Michelle Lomas: So many interesting insights from Alex regarding the future of cashback to drive brand and build loyalty.

Michelle Lomas: Next week we have another exciting episode. Here's a sneak peek.

Dave Simmons: And then we discovered a solution through Commission Factory that said, Hey, listen, we'll develop a chatbot for you and be focused purely on helping you drive sales, and we'll be able to charge you a commission based upon sales generated off the chatbot as the last point of contact on the onsite journey.

Dave Simmons: And it was almost like there was nothing to lose. Uh, in fact, there wasn't anything to lose. So we went, yeah, let's give it a go, and it just took off.

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Michelle Lomas: Flex Your Hustle is made possible by the great team at Commission Factory and produced by Ample. I'm Michelle Lomas. Keep hustling and bye for now.