Carrera joins Reward from his former role as European Managing Director and VP International at PubMatic. The appointment of Carrera marks a strategic move by Reward in driving the ongoing growth of its Card Linked Offers (CLO) technology, the first and biggest of its kind in the UK market.

In his role as Chief Operating Officer, Carrera will report directly into CEO, Gavin Dein, and will be responsible for spearheading the European and international roll-out of Reward's CLO platform. Working closely with client and technical teams, this responsibility will include further developing and strengthening Reward's sophisticated CLO proposition, as well as growing the number of merchants and financial providers using the technology.

Carrera is one of the true success stories in the data and digital advertising industry. After five years in Italy as a financial analyst for some of Europe's top investment banks, he co-founded Godado, the first European pay-per-click search engine. It was from here that Carrera joined Overture Italia before moving on to Yahoo where he worked as both the VP of European Commercial and Operational Strategy for six years, scaling the business across several European markets. Carrera then joined Truvo as the VP of New Media, launching it into the new media age across four countries and transforming the face of the business.

From Truvo, Gianluca joined PubMatic, the leading Real Time Bidding advertising platform, as VP International where he was responsible for setting up all sales, marketing and customer operations outside of the US. It was in this role that he established his region as the fastest growing division within the PubMatic.

Gavin Dein, CEO and founder of Reward, says: "At Reward, we are committed to designing and delivering the biggest and best customer loyalty programmes on offer in the UK and across Europe. Our CLO platform provides merchants and publishers with unrivalled insight into their custoomer's transactional behaviour, enabling highly targeted campaigns that drive increased customer engagement and higher life time value.

"There is currently no one else in the UK delivering CLO programmes of the same size or sophistication as us, and attracting someone like Gianluca is evidence of the business opportunity that lies ahead. He has outstanding experience in developing and scaling complex, data driven businesses making him the perfect fit for Reward and our fast growing CLO platform."

Gianluca Carrera, COO at Reward, added: "Reward's compelling vision, capability and product offering, alongside its commitment to innovation, is driving the loyalty industry into a new age. The sheer size of the potential for Card Linked Offers in the UK and Europe has, up until now, gone largely unnoticed. The value, depth of insight and long-term loyalty Reward's CLO platform offers merchants and publishers is changing this, and I'm extremely excited and proud to be joining the team that is behind making this happen."