The situation
Bink's payment-linked loyalty platform needed to onboard two of the UK's largest banking groups - Barclays and Lloyds Banking Group, whose infrastructure also spans Halifax and RBS - onto card-linked loyalty: letting customers earn retailer rewards automatically when they paid with a linked card, with no app or physical card needed at the point of sale. Each integration carried its own strict security, compliance and scale requirements, and needed close, sustained collaboration with each bank's own engineering teams.
What I did
As Head of Core Technology, I was the technical point of contact for both onboardings - leading requirements gathering and technical clarification on Bink's side, and joining integration calls directly with Barclays' and Lloyds' engineering teams to advise on their side of the work. The integration was built on tokenised card data with direct integrations into the Visa and Mastercard networks (later migrating to Visa's VOP), matching real-time transaction notifications to Bink customers and coordinating with each retailer to allocate loyalty points within a strict SLA - most endpoints under 150ms round-trip - plus firm availability targets and formal change control, given the systems sat directly in the banks' payment path. Lloyds' onboarding needed to support significantly greater scale, since Lloyds Banking Group's infrastructure covers Lloyds, Halifax and RBS. Over the course of both engagements, the engineering team I led grew from 5 to 18 developers, backed by a wider QA and BA function.
The outcome
Enabled enterprise-scale card-linked loyalty for two of the UK's largest banking groups, expanding Bink's reach across Barclays, Lloyds, Halifax and RBS. Both went live without a single issue on Bink's side - complete uptime, no degradation of service - a direct result of the SLA discipline, change control and feature-gating built into the integration from the outset.