Bond and Affina Announce Strategic Partnership to Expand Loyalty Intelligence and Merchant-Funded Rewards.

(March 17, 2026) – Bond, the leading customer intelligence-driven engagement company, has announced a strategic partnership with Affina, a merchant-funded loyalty accelerator and monetization platform. Together, the companies will unlock cross-brand customer insights and merchant-funded earning opportunities to drive engagement and business growth for joint customers. The collaboration deepens Bond’s partner-linking capabilities, expands Bond’s interoperability, and drives greater commercial impact for all parties engaged.

Through the partnership, Bond enhances its market-leading intelligence architecture with additional partner-powered data hydration, strengthening Bond’s North American Wallet IQ dataset, which helps brands not only understand how customers spend—both inside and outside their loyalty programs—but across competitive and adjacent complementary brands and retailers, in a way they can act on. Surfacing usable data on cross-brand spending patterns enables more intelligent CRM, offering smarter competitive targeting and partnership-driven use cases. The collaboration also deepens Bond’s intelligence offering within its Synapze XI platform; cloud-native and AI-powered, it unifies behavioral, attitudinal, transactional, and emotional customer data signals into one system that interoperates with any loyalty or engagement stack.

Affina delivers merchant-funded monetization infrastructure embedded directly within enterprise digital ecosystems. Its card-linked and affiliate loyalty engine enables brands to monetize off-platform consumer spend, generating fully funded rewards, incremental revenue, and actionable first-party data.

Affina’s Loyalty Accelerator connects brands to the Affina Merchant Network, a curated ecosystem of more than 250,000 merchant offers. Through this network, merchants fuel loyalty by funding rewards wherever customers use their existing payment cards. This allows brands to extend earning beyond their owned channels without impacting their own margins.

“At Bond, we are continuously advancing our intelligence ecosystem to help clients create more meaningful and commercially impactful relationships,” said Sean Claessen, EVP of Innovation and Chief Strategy Officer of Bond. “Partnering with Affina allows us to deepen and diversify the signals flowing into our intelligence platform and unlock new ways for brands to more profoundly understand and engage their customers—at speed and scale—thereby creating outstanding ​customer and employee experiences.”

With Bond and Affina’s Card-Linked Partnership Accelerator, a library of merchants fund a brand’s reward points for customers wherever they use their existing payment cards—giving brands more ways for customers and members to earn rewards through everyday purchases, usable back at their brand. The approach boosts the perceived value of loyalty programs, with 84% of customers having a better experience with a brand due to partnerships; 78% are also purchasing more as a result (The Bond Loyalty Report, 2026). Partnerships even drive more frequent engagement with a 4.3x increase in Average Spend Per Customer, while helping brands reinvest in their highest-value customers and support long-term sustainable growth. Richer data enables stronger personalization and smarter targeting based on a much fuller view of customer spend—perfect training data for an increasingly AI future.

About Bond

Bond is the global customer-intelligence driven engagement company that creates growth by building lasting connections between brands, their employees, and their customers. Powered by Bond Intelligence, Bond’s work produces stronger brand loyalty, more advocacy, and lasting growth. Through Bond’s unique integrated growth solutions, Bond is continuously recognized for its approach to engagement by tapping into the full potential of known customer connections through loyalty and engagement program optimization, design, customer intelligence, advanced analytics and A.I. integrated technologies. Bond operates offices globally throughout North America and Europe to support its clients. For more information, please visit www.bondbl.com.

About Affina

Affina is a merchant-funded loyalty and monetization infrastructure provider serving enterprise brands across industries. Through its proprietary card-linked and affiliate loyalty engine Affina enables partners to unlock funded rewards, incremental revenue, and first-party data from everyday consumer spend beyond their owned channels. For more information, please visit www.affinaloyalty.com.