French-based startup firm Joko revealed that it has raised a fund of worth 1.6 million euro from various investors to build its loyalty program. The program will be integrated into debit and credit cards.
The fintech startup firm was established in 2018. The loyalty program of Joko is already associated with leading companies such as Uber, McDonald’s, Zara, Starbucks, and others. The firm has initiated with Startup Garage of Facebook, Station F that emphasizes on personal data protection and privacy.
Investors who supported in raising the fund are Axeleo Capital, Partech, Play, Lafayette Plug, and others. The amount generated will be used by the firm to recruit more data scientist and developers.
Joko is working towards modernizing its loyalty cards to offer uninterrupted customized and centralized user experience. With the help of Joko’s mobile application, credit cards act as loyalty cards. When the mobile application is connected to their bank via a secure interface, users can automatically collect reward points each time when they use their credit cards across large retail providers.
Customer using Joko while paying need not scan or do anything; the customer is automatically informed after purchase and can verify their points in the app. Just with a single click, customer can use them to buy gift cards across various retailers or transfer them into donations to charitable organizations. The mobile application runs on both Android and iOS version.
Co-founder and CEO of Joko, Xavier Starkloff said,
“Our ambition with Joko is to build a strong brand, a product used by millions of people that retailers reward on a daily basis, by putting technology at the service of the user experience.”
Joko company was founded by three people in 2018 namely CEO Xavier Starkloff, CTO Alexandre Hollocou and COO Nicolas Salat-Baroux with the same goal to reimagine loyalty cards by merging them into debit or credit cards.
A few months back Joko launched the beta version of the app and managed to attract tens of thousands of customers, more and more people are adopting the app, increasing user base by 2x each month. Ever since the launch of the beta, customers have already gained tens of millions of reward points.
Joko’s COO Nicolas briefs,
“Our users are looking for a reward and loyalty experience that is simple, a and gamified and that is what we have managed to create with Joko. It is thanks to this experience that we see a real impact on the frequency of purchases and the average basket of our users at the retailers available on the application. For example, with Monoprix, we have seen a 17% increase in expenses.”
The Joko firm has assured numerous associates like Printemps, Franprix, Fnac, Heetch, Birchbox, and Android. They believe in Joko that it will minimize their marketing costs.
Joko successfully designed the technology with the help of Payment Services Directive No. 2 (PSD2) it’s the new European rule that gives customers the power across their banking information.
Partech’s Investment Director, Alison Imbert stated, Joko’s developer team has the vision of fulfilling the new user expectations by depending on the advancement of new technologies, now made possible only by the PSD2, and with high respect of the use of information.
All thanks to the latest PSD2 directive that allows users to give access to their banking information to a third-party app via secure interfaces that bank is forced to create.
Joko is the first firm in Europe to use the PSD2 directive to modernize loyalty cards, Joko considers of expanding the services across the world by 2020.
