Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Cardlytics business update conference call. At this time, all participants are on a listen only mode. After the speaker's presentation,
Good morning, and welcome to Cardlytics' conference call regarding its entry into the definitive agreement to acquire Bridg. Before we begin, let me remind everyone that today's discussion will contain forward-looking statements based on our current assumptions, expectations, and beliefs, including expectations about future performance or results, the closing of the anticipated acquisition, anticipated benefits of our acquisition of Bridg, aspects of the Bridg products, and integration between Cardlytics and Bridg solutions. For a discussion of the specific risk factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from today's discussion, please refer to the Risk Factors section of our 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2020, and in subsequent periodic reports that we file with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Today's call is available via webcast, and a replay will be available for one week.
You can find more information about Bridg on the Investor Relations section of Cardlytics' website. Joining us on the call today is Cardlytics' leadership team, including CEO and co-founder Lynne Laube and CFO Andy Christiansen. Following their remarks, we'll open the call to your questions. With that, let me turn the call over to Lynne. Lynne?
Thanks, Kirk. Good morning, everyone. Thanks for joining us. Hopefully, everyone can see the slides. I am having some technology issues today, so I am not able to see them in the room, but I hope all of you can. Just three simple slides that I'm going to walk you through. Let me sort of describe why we're excited about the Bridg acquisition. In a nutshell, we believe they have created a very compelling and unique technology platform that gives them the ability to aggregate SKU-level data at scale.
Obviously, if you have SKU-level data at scale combined with transaction-level data at scale, which we already have, coupled with our significant reach of 163 million monthly active users, we think this creates a very compelling advertising platform that gives advertisers an unprecedented ability to both understand their customers based on purchase behavior, both inside their stores and outside their stores, and also reach their customers both inside the bank channel and also outside the bank channel, because Bridg has those capabilities today. At a very high level, what differentiates the Bridg platform is their proprietary ability to integrate easily with over 90% of the point-of-sale systems in the United States, so they can effectively aggregate SKU-level data for just about any retailer.
They have developed a very unique fingerprinting process to help that retailer understand all of the consumers at a customer level, not just those who have enrolled in their loyalty program or provided an email. They have the ability to ingest and clean and categorize this data, making it usable, and have access to the open internet through platforms like The Trade Desk, et cetera, to be able to promote offers or advertisements to consumers using SKU-level data. I'll go into more detail on the uniqueness of their proprietary platform in the next two slides. In many ways, Bridg is to retailers and SKU data what Cardlytics is to banks and transaction data.
The two companies are almost identical in all respects in terms of what they built, how they built it from a privacy-first way, focusing on the unique needs of highly regulated organizations such as banks or retailers who obviously have very unique proprietary data. Bridg started in the retail vertical. They're now expanding into big box grocery. They have several marquee clients that have been signed. They are a SaaS-based platform, very sticky and strong recurring revenues. There's a lot of reasons we like this acquisition, guys and gals. Obviously, it gives us the ability to ingest SKU-level data into our existing platform and publish content at the product level into our bank channel.
It also, over time, with bank permission, gives us the ability to do exactly the reverse, which is take transaction-level data combined with SKU-level data and use that to target on the broader internet through Bridg's capabilities. It enables us to think about a measurement business, which I think could compete with the likes of the Nielsen and the IRIs and the Arguses in a pretty meaningful way. Also, interestingly, when you combine our transaction data and Bridg's SKU-level data, which will happen over time and will require bank permission, it gives us the ability to move to an absolute deterministic identification in a privacy-safe way of the consumer versus the probabilistic way that Bridg does it today, which I'll get into more details on. Importantly, guys and gals, this business was built with a privacy-first focus.
Cardlytics, we've looked at a lot of these CDP platforms, this is one of the only ones that we found that really said, how do we do this in a way that is going where the industry is going, not where they are. They are not relying on cookies or pixels or any of the other kinds of practices that are out there. They are uniquely tied to each individual retailer getting access to their data in a proprietary way and cleaning it and uniquely for that retailer to use in a proprietary way. The data is never sold, and it never leaves the platform. Moving on to slide two. I'm going to go into just a little bit more detail about the three things that we think are very unique about their technology.
The first is they have a 60-day onboarding process with the ability to ingest, clean, and make usable any retailer's transaction data. This is dramatically less time than most other CDP platforms that are out there, and they have strong line of sight to dramatically reducing this to less than one week. As I mentioned before, they're able to integrate with over 90% of all the POS systems that are out there, and that number, of course, continues to go up. They have cleaned this data in such a way where it is incredibly usable. Point-of-sale data is really messy. It's actually messier than transaction data because there are so many more SKU points, data points, if you will, that are out there. They have cleaned this down to a high degree of reliability of these are the purchases that a given customer has made.
Insights into the unknown customer. This is really important. Most retailers only know the customers that are either enrolled in their loyalty program or have provided an email. While they have a record of all the transactions, they don't know if it's the same person or not, unless they're enrolled in a loyalty program or have an email. Bridg has developed over years, by the way, a very unique ability to look at transactions at a given retailer and identify a unique fingerprint for those transactions so that they can, with a high degree of confidence, say, "This is the same person." They don't know who that person is, but they're able to say to the retailer, "This is the same person, and these are the six transactions and the 17 items they've bought with you in the past year," or whatever time period it might be.
This, we think, is incredibly unique and incredibly proprietary, and I'll show you a visual of this on the next slide. Then the final thing is they've built a really intuitive, super clean merchant platform and interface, very similar to our self-service platform that we're building, where any given merchant or retailer can log in, ask any series of questions about their consumers, understand who's recently bought whatever product it might be, and then today, target them into the open internet, hopefully over time, target them into our channel as well. It's incredibly intuitive, incredibly easy to use. It works across just about any sort of analytic platform that's out there. Lots of different retailers can use it how they choose. We think it's just really exciting, and we'll show you pictures and visuals of it as we get into Q1 earnings calls.
Finally moving on to page three. This is the point that we're trying to make about helping the retailers really understand all of their customers. Today, they only understand those who are members of the loyalty program or have provided an email. They have records of all the purchases, but they just don't know if this is the same person or not. With Bridg's very unique fingerprinting process that is, we think, incredibly proprietary, they can identify 90+% of the transactions associated with a given individual. Like I said, they don't know who that individual is, but they know it's the same person. Importantly, while this is a probabilistic match, it's highly reliable.
Over time, as we combine transaction data with SKU level data, the ability to go from a probabilistic to a deterministic match and with 100% degree of confidence, be able to say that 100% of the consumers are a person at an individual level, is high. We think this makes us very, very unique. It will take a couple years to really scale this out. Bridg's is still a fairly small company today. They're very sophisticated from a technology perspective, but still in the early stages of working with clients. We obviously believe we can open the doors to a lot of clients for them. We also believe their product can open the doors to a lot of clients for us that we have not successfully penetrated.
It will take a couple of years for us to scale it, for us to combine the data and get the permissions we need from the banks. We do believe two years from now, we have built something pretty remarkable here. With that, I will open it up for questions.
Ladies and gentlemen, as a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press the star then the one key on your touchtone telephone. To withdraw your question, press the pound key. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Again, that's star one to ask a question. Our first question coming from the line of Tim Willi with Wells Fargo, your line is open.
Hi, thanks and good morning, Lynne, and congratulations.
Mo rning, Tim.
A couple questions I guess, and I apologize if you hit on them in your open comments. I jumped on just a little bit late, but first one was could you talk a little bit about the revenue model or how you see it evolving from how it currently may be so we can just better understand that? And then would this be a product that is an add on to your current offering as sort of a discrete option, or does it become a more integrated part of just the overall Cardlytics value proposition? Interestor would help us sort of think about that and flush that out.
Mm-hmm. Yep. Great question, Tim. Thanks. Their revenue model, they are a SaaS-based platform. Retailers pay a subscription to get access to this platform that he has built, where they can understand and run analytics on their consumers, and also publish advertising content to the open internet. It's a subscription-based base price for a given retailer based on the number of customers that they have and that Bridg has identified for them. Then there's additional capabilities that they charge for richer analytics, for example, or publishing. If they want to build a campaign that they publish to The Trade Desk, they charge additional Per use, if you will, fees for that. Pretty sticky SaaS-based business model, which of course we love. In terms of the integration, look, it's a great question, and I think we're still exactly trying to figure it out.
Initially, for call it the next year, we're just going to help Bridg scale with what they have. We will have two solutions that we go to market with. We will have the Cardlytics solution, where you can target based on transaction data inside a bank channel, and we'll have a Bridg solution where you can target based on product data outside a bank channel. Over time, we would like to combine those two. We think the banks will be very receptive to it, but they will want Bridg to have a little bit more scale before we are able to combine those two. We have been building, as you know, our new user experience for inside the bank channel. That new user experience will enable the ingestion of these product-level offers that we can get through the Bridg SKU solution.
We do believe that's where this is going over time, but it will take us at least 12 months, probably a bit longer, to have a fully single integrated solution where the vision is we can go to any given retailer and say we can combine SKU and transaction-level data and give you a full view of your consumers and where and how they're spending money and allow you then to access those consumers inside a bank channel and outside a bank channel as you choose.
Yeah, that's pretty impressive. Just one last follow-up and I'll hop out and get back in the queue. Just thinking about the financial side, anything you can color you can provide around the current run rate of revenue and then just thinking about the scale that you've mentioned several times throughout your comments and scaling it up. Anything we should think about in terms of investment spending and the overall margin story at Cardlytics? Is this something significant or should it not be that material overall to how we think about the margin story at Cardlytics this year and next year?
Yeah. I'll let Andy answer in more details, but they are still a smaller company, so I don't think it's going to be material to our margin profile this year. As they scale, they have significantly better margins than we do. Andy, you want to jump in here?
Sure. Bridg has actually managed their investments quite well over the last several years and they haven't had a significant amount of cash burn. Like Lynne mentioned, we believe there are certain areas like sales and marketing where we can certainly help them and invest and accelerate their growth and gain that scale that's going to be critical. Given those investments, we expect Bridg to be dilutive here in 2021, but potentially accretive by late 2022, depending on the level of additional investments that we think are appropriate. We see a long runway of growth. Expect we'll probably be reinvesting any profits there to scale that business. It is a nice margin profile like Lynne mentioned, but not overly material here this year, our 2021 results.
Great. Thank you very much.
Our next question coming from the line of Jason Kreyer with Craig-Hallum. Your line is open.
Great. Good morning. Thank you. You talked about some of the marquee customer contracts that Bridg has already had signed. I was wondering if you can elaborate on that or give some color the importance of some of the industries that they're in.
Given the nature of an acquisition, we haven't had a chance to talk to some of their marquee clients post-acquisition. We've obviously done reference calls with all of them, but in a partnership way. We don't have permission to use any of their names. We hope by Q1 we'll be able to give you some more color in our Q1 earnings call on the names of some of these marquee clients. As I said, they did start in the restaurant vertical. They have a couple of marquee clients there, but they've recently expanded into grocery and retail and there are a couple really nice wins that they have and are working on in that space. Notably, some of them are clients that Cardlytics does not currently have simply because they have always required the ability to promote products versus overall store-level purchases.
We think this is incredibly accretive, not financially yet, but accretive in terms of being able to add net new clients to the Bridg platform, being able to add net new clients to the Cardlytics platform, and having both of us be able to go out and add net new clients to both of our platforms. Tim, you actually asked a question that I forgot to answer, which is on investment. We certainly will invest, but initially, it's really about our sales force and their sales force working together, their sales force is very small, to go penetrate and create scale. There will be incremental investment, but it's certainly not going to be massive relative to for example, the overall size of the acquisition price.
Maybe just a quick follow-up for Andy. Can you give any details on what objectives or what earn-outs are targeting over time?
Yeah. We haven't talked about the actual levels, but the way that the deal is structured is that over the next two years based on recurring revenue targets, basic growth and recurring revenue from one year out, they'll receive a payment and then there is a tail in the second year based on continued growth in some of their existing accounts. We're very excited about the fact that we have a business here together with synergies to help them achieve those. We fully expect payouts in Q1 and Q2. We haven't discussed those levels externally.
Thank you.
I think you meant year one and year two, Andy.
That's right.
Yes. A reminder, ladies and gentlemen, to ask a question, please press star one. Our next question coming from the line of Doug Anmuth with JP Morgan. Your line is open.
Great. Thanks for taking the questions. Lynne, was hoping you could just talk about how this can help your self-serve capability, how built out that is for Bridg already. Then, secondly, just curious if you've had discussions with the banks already, if you've vetted this with them at all or run it by them?
Yep
if that's really still to come.
Yep.
Thank you.
On self-serve, Bridg, again, a newer technology platform built from the ground up, focused on using cloud, using APIs, using SDKs. Their self-serve platform is super slick, and super intuitive. Unfortunately, until we combine the two technologies, it won't really help us accelerate our self-service platform, which is well underway by the way. We are now actively selling our self-service platform to agencies, of course. It won't really help accelerate our self-service until we integrate those two platforms, which as I said, is probably at least a year, maybe more than that out. Yes, I have vetted this generically with the big three banks.
I actually went to all big three banks, meaning B of A, Wells and Chase, about six months ago and vetted several possible categories of acquisitions with them, including this one which is sort of SKU Level, including Dosh, which was kind of engagement and content capabilities, and including several other types of categories of acquisitions and got their reaction. They were all very excited about SKU Level capabilities. Now it was very generic, so that's very different from actually going to the banks and saying, "Okay, no kidding, we actually have it. Can we combine them?" Based on their receptivity generically, I think we're going to easily get them there. It'll just take time.
Okay. Thank you.
Yep. Also importantly for investors and analysts to understand, Bridg is a standalone business model. If it never integrates with us, it's still incredibly compelling. Like I said, they are to banks and transaction data what we are to retailers and SKU data what we are to banks and transaction data. Even if the two have to stand alone, it's still two very compelling offerings to advertisers. I don't think they will.
I'm not showing any further questions. I would now like to turn the call back over to Lynne Laube for closing remarks.
All right, well, thank you everyone for joining. We appreciate your time and certainly available to answer more questions potentially this week as well as in the Q1 earnings call, which is coming up in just a couple of weeks. Thanks, everyone. Bye.
Ladies and gentlemen, that does end our conference for today. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.