Ansa’s Branded Customer Wallet Delivers a Loyalty Engine That Boosts Merchant Top and Bottom Lines
“Both consumers and merchants deserve more flexibility, which is why we built Ansa.” - Sophia Goldberg, CEO and Co-Founder of Ansa
Payments innovation hasn’t kept pace with modern commerce, and Ansa CEO and co-founder Sophia Goldberg — who literally wrote the book on global payments — is changing that. Together with co-founder and fintech veteran JT Cho (ex. Google, Affirm) and a world-class team, Sophia has created a product that’s poised to evolve the way we all transact.
We are thrilled to lead Ansa’s $14M Series A funding round, with participation from Bain Capital Ventures, B37 Ventures, Box Group, and Wischoff Ventures. I am also honored to join Ansa’s Board of Directors. This investment marks our largest first check to date and comes as Ansa demonstrates remarkable early traction on solving a multi-billion dollar problem for merchants and consumers alike.
Merchants spend over $138 billion annually on credit card network fees — their largest single cost after wages. In fact, 60% of US consumer transactions now take place via credit cards, and the unit economics of these payments simply aren’t set up for the way consumers transact today. Take, for example, a credit card transaction many of us make on a daily basis — our morning coffee purchase. Each $4 latte can incur additional costs exceeding 12.5%. For merchants with narrow margins, these fixed fees can be especially painful.
With Ansa, any merchant with a modern payment service provider or PSP can offer its customers a branded wallet that incentivizes loyalty while also streamlining purchases to pull from an embedded balance. This lets the merchant, not the payment processor, be the one to benefit from the customer loyalty they’ve earned. That means a coffee shop can sell a loyal customer more lattes without incurring more processing fees. That’s part of the magic of a closed-loop customer wallet, and we believe that Ansa is the company that will bring this technology to every merchant looking to reward and engage their customers.
Ansa’s API-first platform enables any merchant to easily create their own branded customer wallet and seamless payment experience. Consumers access a suite of incentives and rewards designed by the merchant, and pull from an embedded balance each time they make a purchase. Merchants own their customer relationships, and Ansa owns every inch of the complexity — including regulatory overhead and risk management. Ansa also surfaces customer insights on usage patterns and performance so merchants can adapt their loyalty strategies using real and current data. Because Ansa integrates with most modern PSPs, including Square, Stripe, and Braintree, new merchants can ramp up right away to begin driving both loyalty and operational efficiency. It is rare to find an early stage product that’s already this powerful and easy to implement.
We were immediately compelled by the sheer vision of this company and further encouraged by the enormous and immediate value the product delivers to its customers. When Compass Coffee partnered with Ansa on their branded customer wallet last year, they experienced a 26% increase in revenue and a 65% boost in engagement from wallet users within the first quarter of use. During the same time period, Ansa’s remarkable integrated technology drove down the company’s payment processing costs by 28%.
Early case studies like this one show that Ansa is effectively letting merchants trade burdensome credit card processing fees for increased customer LTV. The potential influence of this technology will set a new standard for how we all transact in the future by enabling any merchant to deliver a seamless, Starbucks app-like experience to their customers.
Ansa has done more than create a product that delivers exceptional ROI to merchants, they’ve created an experience that end consumers actually want. Compass Coffee saw a 113% MoM adoption of their branded wallet. Merchants eager to boost loyalty and reduce their spend on processing fees are incentivized to drive use of their branded wallets by integrating rewards, incentives, and other loyalty initiatives with customer balances. This incentive alignment puts the product growth in the hands of the merchants who directly — and immediately — benefit from the adoption of the technology by their most loyal customer base. Customers get a seamless, elevated experience and merchants get a loyalty engine that boosts their top and bottom lines.
We have every expectation that the Ansa team has what it takes to make closed-loop wallet infrastructure the status-quo in modern commerce. We’re blown away by this team, who have moved first in this space and smartly leveraged digital value to reshape the way we transact in our everyday lives while providing an unprecedented profit lever for merchants. We believe Ansa has what it takes to transform consumer payments on the widest scale.
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