Rain Debuts Native Loyalty for Stablecoin Card Programs

Stablecoin payments infrastructure company Rain introduced a new loyalty capability called Rewards, according to a Monday (June 15) press release.

Rewards is integrated into Rain’s issuing stack and lets any partner running a card program on Rain launch fully branded rewards for their customers with no need for a separate vendor or in-house infrastructure, the release said.

“Card programs that win today are the ones that give people a reason to keep spending, and rewards have always been one of the most reliable ways to do that,” Rain Co-Founder and CEO Farooq Malik said in the release. “What our team has built lets any partner launch a loyalty program that feels like theirs. The economics and the branding are entirely in their hands, and Rain has removed the integration work and vendor overhead that has historically kept rewards out of reach for so many programs.”

The launch of the product, which the company said in the release the first product of its kind, is a reflection of what Rain has learned from the stablecoin card market.

“With more than 100 programs live on its platform, Rain has seen that a card on its own is no longer enough to stay competitive, and that the programs driving the most spend and retention are the ones with rewards built in,” the release said.

Malik joined PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster and Ryan Rugg, the global head of digital assets for Citi Treasury and Trade Solutions, in an episode of the “From the Block Podcast” in April to explore why the future of digital money is being considered in operational terms rather than ideological ones.

They discussed who can make value move faster, safe and smoother across weekends, borders and regulatory regimes, all while making that complexity invisible to the end user.

Webster said Rain is trying to “turn stablecoins from something you’d hold into something you can spend anywhere,” a deceptively simple notion that helps explain why investors have put hundreds of millions of dollars into the company.

“The biggest market in the world is actually money,” Malik said. “It’s not an industry vertical, it’s not a segment, it’s just money.”

Stablecoins and tokenized money aren’t niche financial instruments seeking out use cases; they represent “a wholesale upgrading of the global financial system,” he added.

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