From Amex to HDFC to LG: This Delhi-based platform is behind all your reward programmes

Everyone loves to see those credit card reward points convert into vouchers for their favourite brands or stores. Right? Ever wondered who curates those benefits? Who decides what brands or stores to offer to consumers so that they stick around for more time with a particular brand of card or loyalty programmes?

Delhi-based Thriwe manages India’s largest tech-enabled “benefits as a platform” ecosystem and has over one lakh partner associations and service delivery presence in 130 countries globally.  

Its partner firms include Amex, Mastercard, Visa, HSBC, Standard Chartered, HDFC, Axis Bank, Mashreq Bank, Union Pay, UOB, DBS, and LG Consumer Goods among others.

Founded in the year 2012 by Dhruv Verma and Swati Sharma, the platform headquartered in India has offices across UAE, Singapore, London, and Florida.

“We provide an ecosystem that delivers premium customer acquisition, retention, & allegiance services to the world’s leading financial institutions, card networks, consumer durables, hospitality, automobiles, so on and so forth,” says Verma.

“More importantly, our product is flexible enough to add or update benefits as per client requirements. Our offerings are always shared as per the customer persona, client category, which is easily incorporated in our catalogue,” he adds.

Interestingly, the company started operations by offering services related to golf -- complimentary golfing subscription, golf marketplace, corporate golf solutions, apps for golf courses, etc -- while catering to the premium segment and even crossed the milestone of one lakh unique golfers on its platform while processing over five lakh golf rounds per annum across the globe.

In 2019, it pivoted towards a marketplace for corporate benefits and customer value-added services.

“The key reason for the pivoting towards the benefits ecosystem was that the play is very big. Human minds are very much aligned towards benefits and whenever we buy something, we always look forward to getting something extra. The benefits as an industry are huge today. We already saw huge success in the space of golf benefits and realised that the scope in the overall benefits space is massive and hence pivoted from GolfLan to Thriwe,” says Verma.

In terms of reach, the platform claims to be servicing over 15 million customers across 60 organisations spread across segments like a credit card, corporate banking, wealth management, consumer electronics, and automobiles among other sectors.

Apart from India, it also operates in the Middle East, and Southeast Asia and is now gearing up to enter the African market while focusing on Kenya, Nigeria, and South Africa.  

Incidentally, the platform has been growing at an average CAGR of around 30 per cent during the past eight years. More importantly, ever since it pivoted from being just a golf-oriented organisation to lifestyle play, it has been growing at 100 per cent year-on-year.

We have grown across different geographies and we have grown in terms of clients and revenues, says Verma.  

Interestingly, the size of the market is huge as any company that wants to offer benefits or loyalty programmes can be a potential business partner for Thriwe.

“For me, the meaning of target audience is any organisation, which wants to give benefits to its customers. We typically work with companies who believe in the fact that other than their core service or the core product which they offer, they will have to offer something extra to retain the customer to create stickiness with the customer,” says Verma while adding that from hotels to airlines to automobile companies to consumer electronics, banks, networks, all sectors use the services of Thriwe in different forms.

At a global level, some of the prominent names in this space include Quintessentially, Ten Group, and Priority Pass among others. Luckily for Thriwe, none of these operate in India, Africa, and the Middle East where the Indian entity is scaling up.

“I think we are very well positioned to become the market leader in the benefits space. We will be investing heavily into technology and very soon we’ll be announcing the launch of our platform into the loyalty point space where we will come up with innovative ‘burn your points’ options such as: ‘burn your points for gold’, ‘burn your points for cryptocurrency’ and so on,” says Verma.

In terms of funding, Thriwe has raised a total of $3 million in funds to date and its valuation is currently pegged at around $120 million. Its revenue stream includes technology fees, usage charges, service fees, one-time setup fee, and monthly management or platform management fee.

In FY23, the company registered revenues totalling nearly ₹200 crore but is eyeing a much bigger pie in the near future.

“We are a company who is ruling the industry with examples and doing exceptionally well and we are dominating the other market players in this domain. With this rapid speed, we are looking forward to accomplishing ₹10 billion before the end of 2025,” says Verma.

“Furthermore, we have been expanding every year and almost all of our sources of revenue are from India and UAE. Now, we are growing our business in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, which have high potential and sizeable markets,” he adds highlighting the fact the benefits as a segment in India is worth over $2.5 billion in size and is growing at a CAGR of nearly 17 per cent.