Set to revolutionise the quality and diversity of its perks and benefits portfolio and the way users interact with these on the platform, this technology will enable employees to connect with their favourite local businesses, getting access to local discounts with just a simple swipe of the linked payment card at the point of sale.

One of the main reasons why traditional local discount programmes fall short is that they are complicated to implement and time-consuming to redeem. They require changes to point of sale systems for local merchants and extensive staff training. Further, employees must remember all their local discounts and show vouchers, loyalty cards and/or discount codes in the process. To that end, using card-linking technology, Perkbox has set off to connect employees with some of the best local merchants around them, simply using their existing credit or debit card. In this way, Perkbox will be adding to its existent top quality high street retailer portfolio a new experience category for employees, local businesses.

Employees will simply have to link their credit or debit cards once to the Perkbox platform and without having to change any of their spending habits, will automatically receive access to the thousands of local perks available on the platform. The savings made from redemptions will arrive in their Perkbox wallet in the form of credit, which can then be spent on other perks on the platform and in the future will be available to redeem for cash. Location based search will allow users to also look up specific perks and view them on a map of their local area on the platform via their smartphone.

Perkbox currently has over 3,000 locations signed up to using their card-linking technology and is negotiating with thousands of others in the coming months. The technology is not limited to local merchants either. Well-known high street retailers such as Pizza Express, Hop, Veeno Company, Black Sheep Coffee and Chipotle have transitioned to this scheme with Perkbox already.

The next stage in the process will be to leverage this technology to help guide employee financial choices, leveraging peer to peer insights from spending in order to help drive better spending decisions.

Ashish Sampat, Partnerships and Propositions Director at Perkbox comments,, “We’re excited to be introducing card-linking technology to our platform, it’s a disruptive solution which gives employees the opportunity to interact with local businesses with little to no effort, seamlessly. We’re confident that this will contribute to our platform’s mainstream appeal and will increase the satisfaction levels of our users. We see this evolving to next stage of our financial wellbeing proposition very soon, that looks into open banking and PSD2, empowering employees to make better financial decisions.”