Mitch Jacobs, founder & CEO, Plink AI, recently shared key insights with Crowdfund Insider.
While commenting on transformative digital technology trends, Jacobs explained that automated commerce is inevitable.
Long before Fintech became a transformative development, Jacobs, founder and former CEO of Ondeck and now Plink AI, was working on various payment solutions.
Jacobs started with a card network he launched from his Dartmouth dorm that enabled local businesses to accept student ID cards as payment. This journey led to Ondeck’s NYSE debut in 2014, one of the companies credited with igniting the Fintech wave.
Recently, Jacobs shared his thoughts on the stagnant state of bankcards since the ’80s and the future of Automated Commerce. With 30 years in Fintech, he discusses how automating commerce can revolutionize transactions, business growth, and banking performance.
Our conversation with Mitch Jacobs is shared below.
Crowdfund Insider: How has your background as the founder of Ondeck, one of the first Fintech companies, led you to where you are today?
Mitch Jacobs: Ondeck had a huge influence on me, but every company I’ve launched shaped my journey. When I started the Green Card at Dartmouth, I didn’t realize I was becoming a pioneer in closed-loop, host-based stored value—I just wanted to eat off campus with my friends. What I learned from running closed-loop programs in communities across the US was that payments can do more than facilitate transactions; they can actively influence commerce.
I thought, “I need to do this on the MC/Visa rails.” In 2001, I launched Tranvia to replicate closed-loop commerce on open rails. We developed a modular platform that was a payment breakthrough, gatewayless e-commerce and support for credit, debit, gift, and loyalty. However, we couldn’t fully connect the two sides of the network and do the kind of personalization and automation we aimed to—we were just decades too early.
Tranvia worked mostly with SMBs and became the backend for AdvanceMe, a merchant cash advance company. I was shocked at how costly cash advances were for SMBs, leading me to build Ondeck, the software for small business lending. To me, credit technology was just an extension of payments. We used payment data for cash flow underwriting and payment rails for micro-servicing. When the economy collapsed, the Great Recession almost killed us, and I learned a lot about structured finance as we had to create a balance sheet and become the lender. That wasn’t the plan, but it worked out, and we debuted on the NYSE in 2014.
Ultimately, all of this experience gave me incredible insights into how the financial payment rails operate. Its shortcomings and potential. That led me to what I’m doing today with Plink AI.
Crowdfund Insider: First, before we get into Plink AI. Why did you go back to another startup? Didn’t you know better?
Mitch Jacobs: Yeah, approaching 50, I found that nothing had changed in me at all—in fact, the opposite. I wanted to go at it again.
Plink, I started out of a moment of frustration. I was scrolling through Instagram, annoyed by yet another irrelevant ad in my feed. Then, I opened my digital banking app only to see the same ad.
It got me thinking: terrible advertising has always been a part of the media—they need the money and don’t have the data to do anything better. But banks? What’s going on here? They don’t need the money, and they do have the data. If they’re willing to be more commerce-forward, why on earth are they doing this?
As someone deeply entrenched in the Fintech world, I realized that banks issuing cards don’t know the actual merchants where I spend my money—that’s a separate industry called merchant acceptance. I realized I was staring at the same problem that I had tried solving in the early 2000s.
I was inspired to revisit the problem of creating a smarter, closed-loop layer on top of the existing MC/Visa rails. That started me on a journey that led to Plink AI and the introduction of Automated Commerce.
Crowdfund Insider: Tell us about Plink AI.
Mitch Jacobs: Plink AI is a platform I’ve been working on for a while now. The idea is that automated commerce is inevitable. It makes no sense that in a world of digital transactions and digital banking, consumers still have on average 17 different loyalty programs, and are still searching for generic coupon codes and promotions.
It’s equally insane that businesses are wasting more money today than ever trying to engage and incentivize consumers. And it’s a crying shame that banks have the assets to create completed automated, personalized commerce but it’s not in their DNA to unlock their potential. Plink puts an end to all that suffering.
Plink AI automates commerce by instantly turning payment data into actions in digital banking. With every transaction, Plink analyzes the data, determines ROI-positive actions, and publishes personalized campaigns.
So, let’s say, a debit cardholder’s spending behavior indicates a decline in their lifetime value to a merchant, Plink publishes messages in her digital banking, incentivizing her to return within 15 days instead of her usual 20. By integrating intelligence and functionality between payments and digital banking, Plink maximizes consumer purchasing power, business profit, and bank performance without any new cards, apps, pos systems, or processing vendor changes.
Crowdfund Insider: Wait, you said this is what you tried doing previously, what’s different now?
Mitch Jacobs: It’s 20 years later. Of course, there are things like phones. But there are a lot of other changes. MC/Visa have both gone public and transitioned from only working with banks to serving snacks to entrepreneurs who will use their APIs. The Federal Reserve has gone from guarding data at all costs to adopting Open Banking. AI is introducing a new tool kit. Digital banking gives money a user interface.
Before consumers, businesses, and banks had “the will”. Now, there is “the way”—as long as we bring Plink to life.
Crowdfund Insider: Where are you with launching the platform?
Mitch Jacobs: The hard part of what we’re doing is we have to fix problems that have accumulated over 50 years of MC/Visa’s relentless focus on eliminating cash and checks. And we have to introduce lots of new solutions. Many systems need to connect together before we have the game changing platform we aim to create. And we have to process billions of transactions to develop the kind of intelligence built into our platform.
We’ve taken on every odd job we can find to develop the solutions. We’ve offered merchant tagging, merchant identification, transaction cleansing, personalized local commerce for community banks and credit unions, and anything we could do at the intersection of payments and digital banking. It’s paid off and we have some pretty cool stuff happening now.
Crowdfund Insider: Are any customers live?
Mitch Jacobs: We have over 300 community banks and credit unions on the platform. There are roughly 11M cardholders amongst them. We process core transaction data from FIS, Fiserv, Jack Henry, Finastra, i2c and then we publish personalized offers from each customer’s unique set of SMBs. Doing this requires most of what we envision being a complete Automated Commerce platform. But, we still have some things we’re working on with the intelligence. One of things our platform does is identify unique commercial districts through payment data so we know which merchants are relevant to a consumer when the card is not top of wallet in that category. We can do this in 1,100 neighborhoods now.
Crowdfund Insider: What is Automated Commerce and what’s the impact?
Mitch Jacobs: Automated commerce fixes 50 years’ worth of problems that have accumulated by a MC/Visa network designed for scale in transactions, leaving the job of customer engagement, business data, and even loyalty, rewards, and promotions to “offline” Value Added Services.
Automated Commerce creates a new standard for what people can expect from payments.
Cardholders want a world where they can maximize their purchasing power without jumping through hoops. Automated commerce goes back to the 1850s before the price tag, when we all had our own price. One-size-fits-all pricing hurts consumers—economists say so. But the crazy ways businesses try to deliver a personalized price are too inaccurate and come with too much friction. Automated commerce solves that.
Businesses just want to get the message to consumers without the crazy waste of advertising. They want decisions made based on real purchase data, not likes, subscriptions, and views. The Automated Commerce system combines ground-truth purchase data and customer lifetime value models with a customized campaign system so the entire revenue job is handled.
Financial institutions would love to help their customers and businesses engage more efficiently. It’s just different from the business they are in. In fact, that’s why they outsourced payments to MC/Visa in the 1960s. Plink’s automated commerce system continues this tradition with no change to the underlying infrastructure but enables financial institutions to deliver a tremendous financial service to cardholders without having to create, launch, operate, and maintain a new marketplace. It relieves the top three constraints facing financial institutions: access to data scientists, access to their own data, and data-driven customer engagement experience.
Crowdfund Insider: What challenges with the payment networks need to be addressed?
Mitch Jacobs: Lots of things, some you’ll immediately recognize.
You know when you look at your statement and ask your partner if you had a date night at Mxcan Fsta Lasala Fmly LLC, when it’s actually Mexican Fiesta Restaurant? That’s the tip of a data standardization problem that makes every single transaction useless without some enhancement.
You assume your financial institution knows where you spend money, right? They don’t. They just display the name. That’s why you get savings offers for a pet you don’t own.
Payments were born pre-internet. The transactions had to travel over costly copper wire, so they were made as small as possible. The address was left out of them. So no one on the issuing side has the address of the merchants you make your purchases at—that’s on the merchant side.
And then there’s the big one. The payment network handles six times more commerce than the internet. But it can only do one thing—add and subtract.
Despite the issues, it’s still far and away the most powerful network for commerce. It just needs some enhancements, and that’s where Plink’s Automated Commerce platform comes in.
Another huge one is that the whole system is stateless. It records and maintains the balance but other than that all the whole relationship between the merchant and the cardholder or the cardholder and the FI is not maintained. The idea of the personal link or “Plink” is that we’re all connected to businesses we transact with. Maintaining these relationships is key to personalization.
Crowdfund Insider: How does this benefit the American consumer?
Mitch Jacobs: #1—cost savings, which is what everyone is searching for today. Consumers can maximize their purchasing power without exposing their personal information or joining, tracking, and using countless loyalty programs. Plink provides one-to-one personalized savings to every cardholder and ensures that consumers receive the best possible prices tailored to their purchasing habits and preferences.
Consumers can make informed decisions and be in control of their spending. They can take advantage of personalized offers based on their spending behavior, allowing them to maximize their purchasing power without friction or additional steps. The personalized offers are integrated directly into the payment network.
Overall, automated commerce promises a more personalized, efficient, and consumer-friendly shopping experience. It leverages the power of AI and digital banking infrastructure to benefit consumers in multiple ways.
Crowdfund Insider: What’s wrong with the incentives that credit cards are providing now?
Mitch Jacobs: The problem is credit card issuers don’t know where consumers spend their money.
They are all over the place and provide a one-size-fits-all program, which doesn’t always align with a consumer’s preferences or spending habits. This is a huge missed opportunity. Businesses are losing out of profit and individuals would rather incentives customized to them. In fact, Ninety-one percent of consumers prefer one-to-one personalization. They simply need to be automatically tailored to the cardholder’s spending patterns.
Plink’s AI captures all the data that financial institutions have previously been unable to decipher and personalizes it. The result is a new network layer that personalizes financial transactions — enabling banks to curate commerce, businesses to drive profit, and consumers to maximize their purchasing power.
Now, anonymously the card already in people’s wallets becomes their own personal network that provides the best price and relevant offers wherever they go without having to manage endless loyalty programs and coupons.
Crowdfund Insider: Why haven’t banks developed this technology?
Mitch Jacobs: Because it requires a new layer in the payments ecosystem and the creation of several It’s because it requires a new layer in the payments ecosystem and the creation of several new technologies, which are hard, time-consuming, and costly.
The card industry lacks the data, intelligence, and action infrastructure needed for transaction personalization.
On one hand, the payment network is a source of incredible data and frictionless money movement. Combined with digital banking, which can be thought of as a user interface for money, it’s the perfect system for personalized commerce.
But the ingredients are missing: A card issuer has no identifying merchant information, no data infrastructure to store merchant information, and no ledger of consumer-merchant relationships—just the consumer’s available balance.
Achieving this future requires a new layer in the payments ecosystem. This includes advanced AI and data infrastructure for generating CLV, personalized closed-loop networks for each cardholder, and a fully automated workflow to replace today’s resource-intensive campaign processes. Moreover, it involves real-time adjustments to personalized customer journeys, continuously enhancing the system’s ability to influence transactions.
Additionally, it requires fixing long-standing problems like unstructured data, missing merchant and location information in transactions, and the division of transaction data into separate industries. The consumer-merchant relationships are stateless, meaning each transaction only updates the customer balance without tracking other metrics of the relationship.
Crowdfund Insider: How are tailored banking and financial services becoming the new standard?
Mitch Jacobs: In line with the theme we’ve been talking about. Consumer perception is that it’s all digital, it’s all math, how hard can it be – personalize my banking experience. Forrester did some work on this and found that 72% of consumers say that bank products offer more value when tailored to their personal needs. 70% of business executives say that personalization efforts are essential to their business success. But only 14% of consumers said their bank delivers excellent personalized experiences. So it’s pretty clear this is the new frontier.
Crowdfund Insider: What’s next in automated commerce?
Mitch Jacobs: 4B consumers digitally transact at 110M merchants and digitally engage with their transactions through the mobile and desktop applications of 24,000 financial institutions. This incredible ecosystem will inevitably usher in a new era of personalized, AI-automated commerce, increasing bank performance, business profit, and consumer purchasing power. Plink has been accelerating the arrival of this exciting future. Now that it’s here, it’s just a matter of scaling.
