Visa to Acquire TrialPay

Visa Inc. made a strategic investment in TrialPay in 2011 then signed a licensing deal in the third quarter of last year to access the company’s platform connecting merchants to consumers. Now it has purchased the company. Terms of the transaction, which was completed in April 2015, were not disclosed.

TrialPay’s platform connects more than 10,000 mobile and online merchants that publish discounts and deals from 3,000 other merchants. Since opening for business in 2006 more than 500 million consumers from more than 180 countries have accessed the TrialPay platform. Merchant offers have been presented in 14 languages.

TrialPay calls its business transactional advertising. In addition to buying something at a significant discount from participating merchants, consumers can be compensated even when they don’t make a purchase, such as after enrolling for a service, watching a video, or taking a survey. Compensation could be in the form of points consumers use to play an online game. TrialPay earns revenue from all actions.

To decide which merchant’s offer will be presented to the consumer, it uses analytics and transaction-related data, including IP address, device type, connection speed, and implied demographics such as predicting the shopper’s gender, which it can do with significant accuracy based on first names.

Once the purchase is made, the seller pays TrialPay a customer-acquisition fee, and TrialPay forwards most of that fee to the website the consumer first visited.

TrialPay revenues since inception have topped $300 million. Total venture capital raised by TrialPay exceeded $70 million from investors including Battery, Index, Greylock Partners, and T. Rowe Price.

Visa’s analytics and consulting services already provide merchants with market insights and campaign measurement capabilities. It is committed to scaling the TrialPay platform to reach more publishers and other merchants, initially in the U.S. It will be more successful in signing larger merchants wanting to make offers, and it can better target their offers using information about cardholders gathered by VisaNet.

Visa is in the process of integrating the TrialPay business into a Visa-operated data center.

Mike Lemberger is VP Offers and Loyalty at Visa Inc. in San Francisco, (650) 454-6896, mlemberg@visa.com, www.visa.com.