Cardlinkin', winner of the 2013 Start-up-Day trophy

Societe Generale rewards Cardlinkin' at the second edition of its innovation laboratory's Start-Up Day.

According to a global study by Ernst & Young, nearly two-thirds of banks are willing to develop customized commercial offers based on their customers' payment data. This is now a matter of course for them. Faced with the exponential development of mobile and tablet devices, banks want to make their mark on the " smart shopping " market and its new uses for mobile consumption. According to the same EY study of 40 financial players from 14 countries, published at the end of 2013, 62% of them want to be identified as providers of personalised commercial offers based on their customers' payment data.

On the occasion of the second edition of its Start-up Day, the Societe Generale Group's Innovation Laboratory (also known under the brand name "Lab by Societe Generale") awarded the start-up Cardlinkin’. Thanks to this start-up's solution, banks offer their customers a loyalty programme in the form of shopping offers.
This Start-up Day was organized in partnership with Atos, Cap Digital, Ecole Centrale Paris and Paris Région Lab around the theme of "Tomorrow's Bank: new roles, new offers".

Selected from around 40 start-up candidates, four finalists - Cardlikin, Dashlane, Ionosys and Scoreway - presented their innovative solutions to an audience of 150 people including internal employees and external guests, notably from the innovation departments of other major companies.
The jury, made up of a representative of each of the partners, was tasked with challenging the start-ups at the end of the demonstrations. 

Cardlinkin' convinced both the public and the jury with its turnkey offer enabling banks to provide a programme of personalised shopping offers for their bank cardholders, while complying with all personal data protection rules.

Consumers benefit from these "good deals" simply by using their bank card at the point of sale or on the Internet. The system is sponsored by merchants.
"This open innovation approach has been a success and demonstrates the need for large companies such as Societe Generale to work closely with light and agile structures such as start-ups. This approach is all the more useful in the context of the digital transformation undertaken by the Group".concluded Françoise Mercadal-Delasalles, Head of Resources and Innovation at Societe Generale.

A vision shared by Steve Peguet, Director of Innovation at Atos in France : "Co-inventing new growth models with our customers and partners is our ambition: the Societe Generale Start-up Day is an excellent opportunity to share our passion for innovation and to encourage all those who seek, innovate and create to enrich our vision of the future of financial services "Now Banking" and banking loyalty.

Societe Generale is developing an open innovation approach, favouring internal and external partnerships. This approach revolves around an Innovation Observatory that analyses technological and societal trends, the "Lab by Société Générale" dedicated to experimenting with innovative solutions, and Participatory Innovation.
To support this approach, for the past nine years the Group has been awarding the "Societe Generale Group Innov' Trophies" every year, which reward innovations made by its employees worldwide.

Cardlinkin Services is a new start-up initiated in 2012 in the fields of Big Data, Marketing and Electronic Banking. Its two founders, Benoit Gruet and Patrick Villeneuve, have respectively brought to the project more than twenty years of experience in the payment, marketing services and new information technologies industries. Accompanied by Oséo and the Finance Innovation Competitiveness Cluster, the young company aspires to become the leading operator of the "Card-Linked-Offer" model in Continental Europe.

- Read article "A gardener at the heart of banking innovation." /UP'Magazine 2013