CUSTOMER: Drop

When the founders of Drop (joindrop.com) set out to build their customer loyalty rewards platform, they envisioned a truly seamless user experience. To ensure they realized their vision, they turned to Plaid.

Plaid’s Transactions product offers clean transactional data and simple integration, so that companies can focus on delivering the best customer experience in the least amount of time.

In an industry plagued by friction at every turn—loyalty cards, online links, corporate partners calling the shots on ubiquitous, standardized offerings— Drop aimed to deliver a frictionless, customer-first approach.

“We saw a big gap in terms of what transactions were being rewarded, and the types of rewards that were provided,” says Daniel Whiffing, Technical Lead at Drop. “Existing loyalty programs tend to offer rewards only for brands with whom partnership explicitly benefited the company, rather than offering rewards for brands that the user personally engaged with. But we wanted to go directly to consumers. To do that, we knew we needed a company like Plaid.”


Personalized to perfection

Drop stood out from the moment it launched.

Built to leverage Plaid’s Transactions, Drop has easy access to clean customer data through connected bank and credit cards, allowing the app to offer rewards based on each user’s individual spending habits and transactions, and consolidate all rewards into one incredibly simple-to-use app.

For users, this means no irrelevant rewards content determined by corporate partners and no friction of physical reward cards or accounts. For Drop, this means that the majority of their engineers can focus on Drop’s core product rather than data solutions. In turn, Drop can offer to users the best possible experience a rewards platform could deliver.

“One huge benefit has been the great developer experience Plaid provides,” says Whiffing. “It allows us to focus on the area that we’re experts in. The integration is so seamless that it’s invisible to most of our team—only a small subset is needed to work on Plaid integrations, so the majority of our engineers can focus on optimizing the core product.”


A one-stop shop

It wasn’t until Drop explored cross-providers that the team fully realized how comprehensively Plaid’s Transactions delivered data.

“We didn’t even recognize the full scope of Plaid’s transaction cleaning until then. Other providers deliver data that is less clean while drastically increasing the complexity of our platform. Data cleaning is very difficult, and while others deliver basic functionality, Plaid has the foresight and resources to go above and beyond that basic responsibility, and takes the initiative to increase the scope of their responsibility to their customers.”

“In the end, Plaid allowed us to focus on what was needed to grow quickly. We could have spent years building a data solution that wouldn’t have come close to what Plaid provides,” says Whiffing. “With clean data, we are truly able to understand a customer’s unique spending habits and deliver exciting, personalized rewards content.”

Scaling faster, delivering more

That personalized edge and time savings helped power Drop’s rapid organic customer growth and impressive engagement rates. After launching in Canada, Drop quickly expanded its services into the U.S., where they onboarded over half a million members in just five months.

“We wouldn’t have been able to do that without Plaid,” Whiffing says.

In just two years, the company’s user base had rocketed from a small group of friends and family to over one million Drop members, while its staff has grown from a small group of five to over 30 employees and counting. By the end of 2018, Drop aims to hit 5 million members across North America.

“Plaid has been like a spring, propelling us forward,” says Esther Park, Head of Marketing and Community. “It allows us to focus on what’s needed to grow and scale more quickly than any other company could have allowed.”

“We get to focus on member experience and our core product, and let Plaid deliver the transactional data. It’s been a catalyst to faster and better innovation. Because of Plaid, we were able to scale quickly without hiring additional engineers, saving us an immense amount of costs and time.”