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.
15 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 Scale Scorecard measures.
The investigation
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
Working alongside your team 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 build the internal fixes with your own technical team. 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're about to scale something nobody has stress-tested
5 ways to work together
All remote. Fixed scope and fixed price, agreed before we start.
The 2-Journey Review
I follow a transaction from the sale to the money landing, and a merchant from onboarding to the first commission it ever earns. Then I find where the 2 collide. Usually in the payment cycle, where the clocks do not line up and nobody owns the gap.
Build Support
I design the workflow, the rules and the exception paths, and write the spec your developers build from. I don't touch the code.
The Quarterly Seat
I come back every quarter and re-walk both - sale to payout, onboarding to first commission - before the new workarounds harden.
Before You Buy One
Buying a rewards or loyalty platform? I tell you whether the operation actually scales.
Before They Buy You
Selling or raising? Your accountants tell you what the numbers say. I tell you whether the operations underneath can handle them, and what a buyer will find when they look.
Ready to go deeper?
Tell me about the business and I'll come back to you personally within 1 working day.
Scale Scorecard · nat@scale-equation.com