What a year it’s been! 2019 has been a bit of a mixed bag for most, but at Fidel, we’ve been hard at work and going from strength to strength. The festive period is always a great time to relax and reflect – so I thought I’d take the opportunity to share some of this year’s achievements before we head into 2020.

Here are the highlights...

AMEX launch 💳

We are very excited to have partnered with another payments behemoth: American Express. Our API integration went live in January and we’re already seeing lots of Fidel customers signing up to add AMEX cards into their programmes. Integrating with any card scheme presents a unique set of challenges, but it’s also a great opportunity to learn from a global payments leader. Even better, it means we now have majority card coverage in all our live territories!

Visa Real-Time in Europe ⏰

It’s really important for us to be able to deliver a consistent customer experience across all card schemes in all territories. Now we can! This year, we added Visa Real-Time transaction spotting in Europe. This is a crucial value-add for our customers. 95% of our existing customers are now migrated over to the new system, with new programmes launching on VRT as standard. The transition meant our team handling a completely new tech stack, so it wasn’t easy – but it was worth it!

Developers’ office 👨‍💻

Lisbon is a hell of a place – just ask our developers! We’ve now migrated most of our development team to a shiny new office there, helping us hire faster and supercharge our product roadmap. It’s been a long process to ensure the team is happy and in a strong position to scale, and so far it’s going really well. Plus, it’s given the rest of the Fidel team a great excuse to visit the sunny Portuguese capital.

North America 🇺🇸 🇨🇦

We are now live and operational in North America! We’ve formed fantastic partnerships with our friends at Visa and Mastercard to enable card-linked loyalty there, and are already seeing our first customers launching programmes. Stay tuned: there’ll be much more to come in 2020.

Customer support ☎️

This has been the biggest challenge - supporting all the fantastic existing and new customers that Fidel has been launching month-on-month. Superstars Ellie (Head of Customer Success) and Kam (Product Support Specialist) came aboard, and we also added Zendesk to our support operations to ensure we’re keeping our customers happy. Now, we have a fully-fledged support team working on the front line to drive Fidel’s mission of enabling access to payment data.

Series A funding💰

This year, we raised our first institutional funding round. At $18 million, it was one of the biggest in Europe, and a testament to the fact that we’re building something our customers really value. It’ll be pivotal in helping us achieve our ambitious plans for growth over the next year – on which note...

What can we expect to see in 2020?

We made our product roadmap public this year, so you can keep an eye on what we’re up to. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can check it out here. As with any roadmap, it’s subject to some change, but here’s a bit of what to expect in the year ahead:

Merchant onboarding 🛍

Smooth merchant onboarding is an industry-wide challenge, but one Fidel is committed to improving. In fact, we’re already working on it.  Speed, accuracy and transparency are the big issues and since May, we’ve been developing some tricks that should help incrementally improve this part of the card-linking journey.

New products⚡️

We’ll also be adding some new products to our existing suite. They’re subject to compliance and development, but we’re looking to launch:

• Statement Credit
• Merchant Category-Level offers
• Digital Receipts

We’ll keep you in the loop as we get underway with these. They’ll all power many more use cases for card-linking, and enable even better capabilities for our existing customers.

Satellite support ☎️

Fidel is becoming a global company, and that means opening offices in lots of locations. One big benefit to our customers is that it’ll enable us to offer 24-hour support, helping cut response and resolution times.

Offers API 🛒

Merchants are a key piece of the puzzle when it comes to card-linking, but so far it’s been difficult for them to engage. That’s all about to change. Fidel will be launching new features and functionality to our Offers API,  making it even easier to add merchant offers to card-linked programs.

Of course, there’s lots more to come – but you’ll have to wait a little longer to see what else we have up our sleeve. In the meantime, subscribe to receive our Product Updates and stay in the loop with our latest news. See you in 2020!