Reward announced a partnership with Tillo on July 15, 2026, to broaden the gift cards available through its international rewards marketplace. The arrangement combines Reward’s consumer engagement platform with Tillo’s connections to gift card suppliers, giving the partners different roles in the same distribution chain. [S01]

Reward supplies the customer-facing proposition and access to banking and retail programmes. Tillo supplies digital rewards infrastructure. For a bank expanding its loyalty offering across countries, the practical issue is whether customers can redeem value with brands they actually use, rather than simply whether the catalogue is large.

An engagement business with a new parent

Reward began in 2001 and developed into a provider of card-linked rewards, with a white-label banking platform and operations in more than 15 countries. Its business links transaction insight, consumer offers and retailer engagement. Gift cards are one element of that proposition, rather than its entire product. [S02]

Ownership also matters. Rezolve Ai announced its acquisition of Reward in February 2026 for $230 million in cash, describing a plan to connect its commerce technology with Reward’s banking and retail relationships. That transaction preceded the Tillo announcement. July’s agreement is a distribution partnership, not another acquisition. [S03]

Within that structure, extending a rewards catalogue is a relatively focused expansion: Reward can add redemption choices without having to establish every underlying retailer connection itself. It still has to make those choices relevant to each programme. More available brands do not automatically mean more useful benefits in every market.

What each partner is trying to achieve

Tillo’s announcement presents international scale and locally relevant choice as the rationale. Chief executive Alex Preece links the agreement to supporting Reward’s expansion, while Reward’s Anna Jaycocks describes a broader catalogue as complementary to its data-led engagement proposition. The companies do not disclose the partnership’s pricing or revenue split. [S01]

The commercial opportunity for Reward is to improve the usefulness of the programmes it sells to banks and retailers. A customer who can find a suitable redemption option has a reason to return to that programme. This is a retention mechanism, not evidence that the integration has already improved customer retention.

For Tillo, the potential gain is distribution through an established intermediary rather than acquiring each bank programme separately. For participating retailers, the route may introduce prepaid demand from audiences reached through Reward. Any discount or supplier charge has to be weighed against that demand, especially if a purchase would have happened anyway.

Where the evidence stops

The announcement provides no before-and-after redemption figures, incremental retailer sales or bank contract wins attributable to this integration. Those would distinguish genuine expansion from a larger catalogue displayed to the same users. The deal is therefore best understood as new distribution capacity within an existing engagement business, with its commercial performance still to be demonstrated.