Ahmad Ismail, co-founder at Kudos, joined Cheddar News to discuss how the smart wallet company helps consumers get the most out of their credit card rewards.

Ahmad Ismail, co-founder at Kudos, joined Cheddar News to discuss how the smart wallet company helps consumers get the most out of their credit card rewards, such as cashback, travel points, and more. "We consider ourselves the self-driving wallet, and what that means is we try to remove the decision of how to pay for something," he said.<br>

 Kudos Helps Users Get the Most Bang for Their Buck

smart wallet startup kudos Technologies raising $7 million in a seed funding round led by patron kudos announced its official public launch just a few weeks ago, the startup says it's a smart wallet that works everywhere. Users shop online and helps them save time and earn money wherever they shop joining us now is Ahmad is male co founder of kudos. Welcome to the show. It's great to have you can you share some more details about kudos and of course what it offers to its users. Yeah, thank you for having me. Um so we uh we consider ourselves the self driving wallet and uh what that means is, you know, we try to remove the decision of how to pay for something um you know, out of your mind and the way it works is when you get to a checkout, it automates the it helps you pick the best card by looking at all the credit card benefits that are available in your wallet. You know, things like purchase protection, um, you know, lost luggage protection um as well as looking at the rewards of the purchase. Um it spits out a recommendation that says, hey, this is the best card to use for this particular purchase. The amount of rewards that you can expect to earn and the benefits are associated with this purchase and you can actually use an auto fill your credit card including the CVV um with our product, how do people who are interested in using kudos set up their own digital wallet. How complicated is it? It's fairly easy. Um we, I'd say you could probably get set up in a minute or two? Um We are launched in the chrome store and uh in IOS IOS is relatively new. Um but if you go to join kudos dot com, you should be able to see uh links to both. Um and you can get set up putting all your cards um you don't have to put in your card numbers right away, you can do that over time, which is something a lot of customers do and uh pretty soon uh you'll be getting the most out of all the cards that are in your wallet. Kudo says it works with more than one million merchants. What are some of the retailers and companies that people can use kudos to shop at? How does it improve the experience compared to other methods of payment? Yeah, well we took a decision early on in the in the company to build a browser extension, a browser plug in. And the reason behind that was because, you know, uh we've seen in our experience that working directly with merchants, you know, doing merchant partnerships where their button is on their checkout page takes many months and requires a ton of time and effort and money. And so as a browser extension, our our product lives directly in the browser with you and wherever you go. Our product uh analyzes the page that you're on, spits out a recommendation and Uh you know, auto fills the card the way that other browser plug ins work. Is this a moment ago saying Kudos supports about 3000 credit cards. Can you explain how your company integrates with the other credit card companies? Yeah, so we we we primarily do a lot of uh a lot of the credit card data and information is actually super hidden inside um you know, terms of service pages like how long the benefits will last one of the terms that benefit apply. And so what we do is we actually spend a lot of time reading those terms of service and all the details that go into those benefits for the customer. We put it into our database ourselves and then our algorithm looks across all the cards in your wallet and the data that we have on the card to, to spit out recommendation. So we, we've kind of built a lot of our knowledge of credit cards entirely on our own. We do partner through a third party um whenever you want to apply for a new credit card so that we can actually um make an affiliate uh some affiliate revenue off of off of you opening a new card that we recommend kudos has referred to its smart wallet as its first production, any plans to launch other products in the future. Yeah, we are, we are actively working on a couple uh a couple of things. Um so the uh the thing that we're most excited about is a concept called dream wallet and um, for folks who are not super into credit cards, they much like myself actually it spits out your dream wallet and the idea behind it is it looks across all the things that you spend at and all the gaps that are in your wallet and spits out a set of cards that define your dream wallet that maximizes based on the way that you spend, what cards you should actually have in your wallet. And so that's one of the things that we're most excited about. We're also working on a, what we call kudos boost, where we are going to help boost people's credit card records that they're in, um, you know, for achieving certain milestones, referring people and things like that. Well, congratulations on your latest funding round. What do you plan to use that funding for? Yeah, growth. We've seen really strong metrics across growth and retention and we're really just trying to double down. Um, and you know, grow, grow our early, uh, early user group, a modest male co founder of kudos. We appreciate your time. Thank you so much