Consumers are routinely rewarded for spending, but the disparate loyalty and rewards points pose a unique challenge: How can you maximise benefits? Typically, customers either have limited choice to use reward points, or have no knowledge of how to encash them at all. It is to overcome such issues that Amit Koshal co-founded the start-up Twid in June, 2019.
Twid is a new payment platform that accumulates multiple loyalty and reward points offered by banks, retailers, and any other service provider and enables consumers to access them at one place. These points, irrespective of the provider, can be used everywhere or to purchase anything, be it shopping, grocery, cabs, dining, food ordering, flights, etc.
“Generally, users get an opportunity to use reward points at designated stores, and may not be able to redeem things of their choice. Twid’s USP is to convert the reward points, so that they can be used for general purposes. The perplexity of the current reward ecosystem is that we have multiple loyalty programs from banks, brands, airlines etc that we all are part of, but that we rarely keep track of,” said Koshal.
“We solve all these and bring them under Twid, combine them as per their current conversion ratio set by the bank or brand so that it becomes big and then it can be used anywhere and everywhere. So, a shopping brand reward can be used to pay your coffee or dining bill,” he pointed out.
So, how does it work? Twid runs on integrated technology with banks and brands to fetch the user’s current reward balance in real-time. It uses a mobile number and the name of a user to auto-fetch details. Users can also manually feed details of the bank or a brand and update the accumulated reward points. Going forward, Twid hopes to improve seamless payments and engage with merchants and banks to better communicate with consumers.