The news: Citi’s US consumer cards business will buy Kard Financial, per a press release.

Kard Financial’s commerce media platform links financial institutions with merchants through verified transaction data and merchant offers.

Why this matters: Acquiring Kard effectively gives Citi a ready-built financial media network (FMN), as it races to catch up to issuers and payment providers like American Express, Mastercard, PayPal, Western Union, and Chase that have already debuted their own networks.

This also gives Citi a new way to monetize the cross-merchant payment data from its 35 million consumer cardholder accounts in North America—while also boosting transaction volume if the rewards resonate with cardholders.

Zooming out: FMNs have particular strengths that are attractive to advertisers. They can access first-party transaction data across merchants rather than being constrained to data from individual retailers.

We forecast that FMNs will be the fastest-growing commerce media vertical that we track: FMNs will cross $1 billion in US ad spend by 2026 and grow at 66.7% CAGR through 2027. 

Implications for issuers: FMNs are gaining momentum, but they haven’t reached maturity yet. 

If issuers double down on personalized rewards, they could solve a key challenge: maintaining consumer loyalty. Four in 10 prospective cash-back cardholders cite rewards as one of the most valuable aspects when choosing a card to apply for, per our benchmark. If issuers make rewards tailored to their cardholders’ shopping behavior backed by FMN data, they may be able to secure long-term loyalty from satisfied users.

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