• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, September 28, 2021

Fintech company SKUx wants to change the way brands deliver discounts to consumers, and in turn, increase returns from performance marketing.

SKUx's technology, announced Tuesday with the launch of the company, centers on a partnership with Hedera Hashgraph, a distributed public ledger that will provide a secure network for logging and verifying all transactions and data running on its platform.

Tracking the supply chain of an offer or discount increases trust, said Bobby Tinsley, co-founder-executive vice president of SKUx.

He started the company with several others in 2018 to stop fraud related to discounts and offers through advertising. “It’s radically different than a paper coupon,” he said. “The brand also can see all the data and analytics through the platform.”

The platform is the technology layer that supports retailers, brands, and marketing services companies with a serialized and a trackable payment-based technology called SKUPay. It’s aimed at increasing trust and transparency for special offers and discounts electronically.

The SKUx platform requires no special point of sale integration, and enables daily settlements for retailers. The discounts can be distributed through email, SMS text, QR code, social media, mobile, on-pack, display and other types of media.

The SKUx Smart Incentives platform, running on the Hedera public distributed ledger network, tracks and records all transactional data as a secure hash on the Hedera public ledger.

The technology also includes heat maps that tell advertisers where the discounts are being used in real time.

“When you’re distributing coupons, you’re going on historical data, hoping you don’t under or over redeem discounts,” he said.

Tinsley said brands are testing the platform in the U.S., but the plan is to expand internationally. He declined to cite the names of the brands.

“We are not part of the marketing campaign, but rather the payment system,” Tinsley said.