Global payments provider Blackhawk Network announced its acquisition of Rybbon, a leading digital rewards platform based in Washington DC, USA and in Calicut, Kerala, India. With this partnership, Blackhawk puts the power of its scale and experience as the incentives industry leader behind Rybbon’s SaaS-based platform to make digital rewards more delightful, impactful, and easy to integrate into workflows. For users of today’s top business platforms, this solution enables users to simply add rewards directly into their program workflows. The integrated rewards offering joins Blackhawk’s suite of incentive platforms supporting more than $5B in rewards issued annually. To date, Rybbon has over 1,100 customers on the rewards platform, managing over 50,000 campaigns that have delivered rewards to recipients in 160 countries. By joining with Blackhawk, Rybbon can tap into the power of a global reward offering, expanding reach and choice for recipients.

“This is an exciting disruption to the incentives industry,” said Jeff Haughton, SVP, Incentives, Corporate Development & Strategy at Blackhawk Network. “We couldn’t be more thrilled about this acquisition, which builds on Blackhawk’s legacy of helping businesses across the globe leverage payments and rewards to drive brand engagement, loyalty, and growth. Amid increasing demand for digital rewards and streamlined operational efficiency, an integrated rewards platform like Rybbon can drive results and save program administrators time. We are looking forward to building on Rybbon’s success.”

“We are thrilled to join the Blackhawk team so we can expand upon our vision to make rewarding customers and employees easy, delightful and impactful,” said Rajeev Veettil, CTO of Rybbon. “Blackhawk has long been a leader in payments and incentives. It’s scale, reach and deep experience in global incentives will make Rybbon the natural choice for companies looking to adopt a modern rewards management platform. As an industry pioneer, we are proud to carry on our legacy of innovation through the important work of our Center of Excellence team in delivering innovative rewards solutions that will shape the future of global branded payments.”

Rybbon's India Centre of Excellence (CoE) based out of Calicut will play a critical role in building high-quality software based on modern cloud computing technologies to cater to the growing needs of global customers. The platform can be leveraged for marketing rewards, survey-taking incentives, employee rewards and holiday recognition, and is ripe for introduction into other widely used platforms, namely video communications platforms, remote workforce collaboration tools, enterprise HR systems and more. The solution offers a variety of digital prepaid and gift card rewards, which have been shown to be effective incentives for driving loyalty and motivation. Rybbon’s guided integrations and templates makes launching and managing rewards programs fast and simple. For international rewards recipients, users specify a reward value and each recipient’s reward choices are systemically curated based on their country, currency and applicable regulations.

The Rybbon team in Calicut will continue to shape the digital rewards management platform for customers and partners worldwide. It will also focus on hiring top talent across a broad set of technology, product and project management disciplines and experience levels. Blackhawk’s first Strategic Development Centre was launched in Bengaluru in 2019. With Rybbon’s acquisition, Calicut serves as the base for Blackhawk’s second CoE and further enhances the company’s ability to serve its customers.

Visit Rybbon online to learn more about integrations and use cases, and view the full reward selection, including a variety of employee and consumer rewards that can be offered digitally, such as egifts and virtual prepaid cards.