Reward, cashback, affiliate and creator platforms
Can you prove how long your money takes to move?
Most people can name the number. Far fewer can show me where it came from.
20 years in operations. 9+ years in affiliate and cashback, across an estate of 4,200 retailers. 4+ years in fintech payments, 200 merchants onboarded.
Tell me about your platform →Designed for
Businesses with real operational complexity. Multiple teams, real volume, and money moving between several parties before anyone gets paid.
- Cashback, reward, voucher and affiliate platforms
- Loyalty and card-linked rewards, including bank-embedded programmes
- Employee benefits and incentive platforms
- Gift card and payout platforms
- Affiliate networks and partner platforms
- Anyone who takes money from brands and pays it out to whoever earned it
- UK or international. Engagements are conducted remotely
What I look at
6 areas, walked on both journeys - sale to payout, and onboarding to first commission.
- Partner onboarding - how a partner gets from signed to earning.
- Recording what happened - tracking, attribution, matching, and untracked sales.
- Checks before money moves - validation, approval windows, reversals.
- Invoicing, payouts and reconciliation - the invoice cycle, payout runs, what does not reconcile.
- Data into decisions - what the numbers are used for once they exist, and who sees them.
- Team and process resilience - what happens when the person who knows is not at their desk.
These are the same 6 the assessment scores.
The investigation
I carry out the investigation myself. There is no team behind this and no associate doing the first pass.
01What's actually happening?
Understanding what's really going on beneath the surface. I walk both journeys myself - a transaction from sale to payout, a merchant from onboarding to first commission - and look at the meetings, spreadsheets, approvals and workarounds nobody writes down.
02Why is it happening?
Connecting the behaviours, the systems and what shows up across similar businesses, because they rarely operate in isolation. This is usually where things start to make sense.
03What is it costing you?
Proving the cause. The findings, the priorities and the commercial opportunities, specific and tied to outcomes. Written for your business, not adapted from somebody else's.
04What already works
Handing your team what they need to put the recommendations into practice, replicating what's already proven elsewhere in the business rather than rebuilding from scratch.
05Past "fixed"
The destination is profitable, sustainable scale. A diagnosis nobody acts on is only an interesting conversation.
Then what happens
06Inside the walls first
Review the process and specify the internal fixes for your own technical team to build. Admin portals, status layers, systems that take the manual load out. Everything here is something you already control. This is the stage where automation earns its money, because by now you know which parts of the process should still exist.
07Then outside the walls
Partner relationships and contracts. Validation and payment terms.
I don't arrive with the answer already written. I arrive with questions.
Recent investigations
Cashback platform · major telecoms programme
90 days to 60, from 1 extra field
One of the largest programmes on the site. Tracking was clean, but nothing could be matched back to a live order, so validation was still being done by hand. 1 change to what we captured made the matching automatic.
Reward platform · national telecoms and media partnership
Member payout cut from 60 days to 45
Nothing here was broken. The brand simply refused to settle for "good enough". A targeted cash-flow fix took a quarter off the wait, and 5-star reviews followed the same quarter.
You probably don't need me yet
- You can already say how long money takes to move end to end, and prove it
- Every stage has a name against it, and that person would agree it's theirs
- Nothing important depends on 1 spreadsheet or 1 person being at their desk
- You know exactly what needs fixing and you just need hands
Worth a conversation
- Revenue is growing faster than the operation underneath it
- Different teams have different versions of the same number
- Money takes longer to move than anyone can quite explain
- Something has become "just how we do it" and nobody remembers deciding
- The technology is in place and the joins between it are still manual
- You are about to scale something nobody has walked end to end
Ways to work together
It is the same investigation every time. What changes is who is asking, and how much of the machine they need me to walk.
If you are selling, or raising
Before They Buy You
Buyers do not investigate an operation they cannot see. They hold money back against it. A slice of your price, sitting in somebody else's account for a year or 2, released only if the things they were unsure about turn out not to matter.
Your accountants tell you what the numbers say. Nobody tells you whether the machine underneath them stands up to a stranger reading it line by line.
What you get: the questions a buyer's team is going to ask, answered 12 to 24 months before they ask them, while there is still time to change the answer.
Before You Raise
Investors do not hold money back. They price lower, or they release the money in stages against milestones you then have to hit.
The growth plan in your deck is a forecast of what happens between a sale and a payout. I walk that and tell you whether the operation delivers it at the volume in the model.
What you get: where the operation holds at the numbers you are presenting, where it needs people thrown at it, and what that does to the plan.
If you are buying a platform
Before You Buy One
The plan says 2 platforms become 1. That means 2 merchant estates, 2 tracking systems, 2 invoicing cycles, 2 payout runs and 2 sets of partner terms, all resolving into a single way of working.
I follow the money through the target on both journeys - sale to money landed, and onboarding to first commission - and find where the 2 machines disagree.
What you get: what it costs to join them together, where the operation holds at the combined volume, and what that does to your first 100 days.
After You Have Bought One
You own it, the integration is done on paper, and the plan assumes the machine scales with it. Nobody has walked it to find out.
What you get: what breaks first, what it costs to fix, and what happens if nothing changes. Written for you rather than for the management team, though I will happily walk them through it.
If you run the platform
The 1-Area Investigation
You have already spotted something. One process, one team, one number that never quite adds up. Bring me that, and I follow it from wherever it actually starts to wherever it actually ends.
What you get: where it actually begins, which is rarely where you noticed it, who else it touches, and what changing it is worth.
The 1-Journey Review
Half the machine, walked properly. You pick which half - a transaction from sale to money landed, or a partner from onboarding to first commission.
What you get: every place that journey stops, in the order of what each one is costing you.
The 2-Journey Review
A transaction from sale to money landed. A merchant from onboarding to first commission. Then where the 2 collide, usually in the payment cycle.
What you get: a written account of where value is getting stuck, why, and which bits you can actually change.
The Quarterly Seat
I come back every quarter and re-walk both - sale to payout, onboarding to first commission - before the new workarounds harden.
What you get: each quarter, what has drifted since the last time, and what is forming.
Build Support
Sometimes the answer is a change to the system rather than the process. When it is, I design it and write the spec. Your developers build it. I don't touch the code.
What you get: mock-ups and a specification your developers can build from - what the system has to check, what it has to show you, and what good looks like once it is running.
Ready to go deeper?
Tell me about the business and I'll come back to you personally within 1 working day.
Transaction engine · nat@scale-equation.com