Dejan

Making rewards feel like real money – letting customers move points where they are worth the most.

Product case study · Role: Product Manager · Domain: Loyalty / Rewards

TL;DR I led Points Transfer, which lets customers move their rewards points out of the card program – to partner loyalty programs where the points unlock more value. The work combined a rewards ledger with strict correctness guarantees, partner integrations, and careful fraud controls, because points transfers are effectively irreversible money movement. Transfers quickly became one of the most-used redemption options, and customers who transferred went on to concentrate more of their spending on the card.

The problem

Points that can only be redeemed one way feel like a coupon, not a currency. Customers accumulate rewards and then hit a wall: the redemption options do not match what they actually want, so points sit unused, perceived value drops, and the rewards program – usually the single biggest cost line in a card product – stops driving the loyalty it was built for.

Transferability changes the psychology. When customers can move points to a destination they care about – an airline or hotel program, a brand’s own loyalty currency – points start behaving like money with upside. That perception drives card usage: people concentrate spend on the card whose points go furthest.

What we built

• Transfer flow in-app – customers see their points balance, choose a destination, link their loyalty account, and confirm the transfer with a clear statement of the conversion rate and what they will receive.
• Partner connections – integrations with partner loyalty programs to validate the destination account and deliver points reliably.
• Clear rates and previews – the conversion rate and resulting balance are shown before confirmation; no surprises after the fact.
• Status tracking – transfers show as pending until the partner confirms, with notifications on completion, so customers never wonder where their points went.
• Safety rails – confirmation steps, transfer limits, and account-security checks proportionate to the fact that transfers are one-way.

How it works

The flow

A customer opens the rewards tab, picks a transfer destination, and links their account with that program (typically membership number plus name matching). They enter an amount, see the conversion and the resulting destination balance, and confirm. The points are debited immediately, the transfer request goes to the partner, and the customer is notified when the points land – usually within minutes, occasionally up to 24-48 hours depending on the partner.

Key product decisions

• Irreversibility is the design constraint. Once points land in a partner program, we cannot claw them back. That single fact shaped everything: confirmation UX, name-matching requirements, velocity limits, and step-up verification for risky transfers.
• Debit first, deliver second. Points leave the customer’s balance at confirmation, not at partner delivery – eliminating double-spend windows. If a transfer fails on the partner side, we credit back with a clear explanation.
• Transparency over marketing gloss. We show exact rates and amounts rather than “up to” framing. Trust in the rewards currency is the whole game.
• Name matching. Requiring the destination loyalty account to match the cardholder’s name closes the most obvious fraud path: draining a compromised account into an attacker’s airline account.

Under the hood (for the engineers)

• Rewards ledger. Points sit on a ledger with the same rigor as money: every earn, burn, transfer, and adjustment is an immutable entry; balances are derived, auditable, and reconciled. Transfers are two-phase: debit and hold, then confirm or roll back on partner response.
• Partner integration layer. Each partner has its own API shape, latency profile, and failure modes. A common transfer-state machine (requested, submitted, confirmed / failed, refunded) isolates partner quirks from the core product.
• Idempotency and reconciliation. Retries must never send points twice; daily reconciliation against partner reports catches anything that slips between systems.
• Fraud surface. Account takeover plus instant irreversible transfers is the nightmare scenario. Controls included velocity limits, new-device and recent-credential-change friction, and step-up authentication on first transfer to a new destination.

My role

• Owned the product end to end: transfer UX, rate presentation, partner-facing requirements, and the fraud/friction balance.
• Worked with partner teams on integration contracts and SLAs, and with risk on the control framework for irreversible transfers.
• Defined ledger requirements with engineering – especially failure and refund semantics.
• Led the rollout of the first transfer partners end to end, from integration requirements through launch, alongside the rewards and risk teams.

Challenges and trade-offs

• Friction vs. fraud. Every security step protects customers and costs conversions. We tiered friction by risk signals instead of applying it uniformly.
• Partner reliability. Our experience is only as good as the slowest partner API. Pending states, honest ETAs, and proactive notifications turned partner latency from a support driver into a non-issue.
• Rewards economics. Transfer rates interact directly with program cost and partner agreements; product, finance, and partnerships had to move as one on any rate decision.

Results

• About 18% of rewards-active customers completed at least one transfer within six months of launch.
• Customers who transferred increased card spend by roughly 20% in the following quarter compared to matched non-transferrers.
• Fraud losses stayed below target, and the median transfer completed in under five minutes.

What I learned

Points are a currency, and customers treat them with a currency’s emotions – which means errors, delays, and ambiguity are felt as strongly as with real money. The discipline that mattered most was treating the rewards ledger and transfer path with full payments-grade rigor, and treating every moment of uncertainty in the flow as a product defect to design away.