Bilt’s rewards program is built around rewarding members for spending at local businesses in their neighborhoods. Unlike traditional category-based programs, Bilt’s approach depends on accurately identifying which merchant and which location every transaction belongs to. That makes accurate attribution foundational to the program — and led Bilt to partner with Spade.
Impact at a glance
- Enabled accurate attribution for merchant-specific, hyper-local rewards
- Reduced customer complaints tied to missed or misattributed benefits
- Lowered operational overhead from manual investigations and make-good payouts
- Allowed Bilt to scale a differentiated rewards program with sustainable unit economics
The Opportunity
Bilt rewards members for purchases at specific neighborhood merchants, instead of broader categories like “dining” or “travel.” Today, that includes more than 45,000 local businesses across a network serving over 5.5 million members.
When transactions aren’t matched correctly, members don’t receive promised rewards. And each miss can trigger customer frustration, hours of customer service investigation, and costly make-good payouts. At scale, even small attribution error rates become expensive.
Before Spade
Early on, Bilt relied on standard transaction data to identify where members were spending. Merchant descriptors were often inconsistent, locations were ambiguous, and as they added new partners, manual mapping and reconciliation was required.
As Bilt’s partner network grew, so did the operational burden. Each misattributed transaction could take hours of investigation, so to protect the member experience, rewards were often issued regardless of confidence in the underlying data.
With Spade
Integrating Spade’s transaction enrichment gave Bilt a reliable attribution foundation by linking transactions to verified merchants and locations. This improved accuracy across Bilt’s hyper-localized rewards program, ensuring customers were rewarded for the right transactions.
Bilt used Spade’s merchant graph to validate transactions against its growing partner list, increasing attribution accuracy and customer satisfaction. As the program expanded, however, that process still required manual reconciliation between enriched transaction data and local partner lists.
To remove that friction, Bilt implemented Spade’s Attribution Agent. Built on top of enriched transaction data, the agentic workflow applies automated logic to validate transactions against Bilt’s partner lists and Spade’s merchant graph in real time. The team can now scale its rewards program efficiently without adding operational complexity as new merchants, neighborhoods, and customers are added.
Applications beyond Bilt
Bilt’s experience shows what happens when attribution isn’t treated as afterthought. Transaction enrichment makes personalization possible, and agentic attribution makes it scalable. For institutions running personalized rewards, card-linked offers, or merchant-specific promotions, automating attribution reduces cost, protects compliance, and allows differentiated programs to grow without breaking operations.