Odynn & Atomic Webinar Summary

In brief. Odynn, which builds white-label travel and loyalty portals for banks, issuers, and fintechs, has partnered with Atomic, a connectivity provider best known for payroll and direct-deposit switching. With Atomic’s technology Odynn launched Traveler DNA®, a service that gives a cardholder a single, live view of every loyalty balance, elite status, travel credit, and card perk they hold — and gives the financial institution structured data it can use to personalize offers and cross-sell. The enabling breakthrough is Atomic’s Uplink technology, which lets the customer log in to airline and hotel programs on their own device so that no credential ever leaves their device nor touches a third-party server.

Why loyalty is being pulled into open banking
Garner described open banking as the merging of four pillars that have historically run as separate businesses: payments (interchange economics on rails the customer never sees), banking (balance-sheet products and monthly app touchpoints), loyalty (program currencies and partner networks, usually run as a cost of acquisition), and commerce (merchant margin and the moment of decision). Payments and banking converged first; agentic payments are now pulling in commerce; and loyalty is the pillar Odynn and Atomic are, in Garner’s words, bringing in “kicking and screaming.” As the walls come down, institutions face a choice: become an API plug-in to consumer AI platforms such as OpenAI or Anthropic, or build an ecosystem customers choose to transact inside.

The economic argument for the second path is that a well-run loyalty program should be self-funding rather than a cost center. The flywheel below, from Odynn’s deck, shows the mechanism with illustrative numbers. A customer uses their bank card for a $100 travel booking or retail purchase (step 1). The booking generates a commission to the institution — about $7 on average (step 2). The institution shares part of that with its suppliers and partners and allocates the remainder, roughly $5, to the customer relationship (step 3). Some portion, perhaps 3%, comes back to the customer as points, miles, or cash back (step 4), which the customer then redeems — driving the next purchase and starting the loop again. Garner’s caveat: the model is simple when done correctly but “very, very easy to mess up,” and an institution may deliberately run it at a loss to acquire or retain customers.

Figure 1. The loyalty flywheel: every booking funds the next reward. (Source: Odynn webinar deck.)

The stakes are big. Garner noted that Delta expects roughly $5 billion in profit this year while American Express pays Delta about $8 billion for its co-brand relationship — meaning the loyalty program, not the flying, is what makes the airline profitable. The competitive landscape has shifted as well. American Express set the standard with Membership Rewards in 1991; Chase’s Sapphire cards reset it from 2009. Since COVID, cards have become far cheaper to issue, opening the door to entrants such as Bilt and Rain (stablecoin-based cards), while Wells Fargo and Citi have sharpened their offerings. The deck’s framing: the real scoreboard is no longer accounts opened or cost per acquisition — offers a competitor can match within a quarter — but share of wallet at the moment of decision.

Odynn: an “AI Shopify for travel and loyalty”
Odynn stands up embedded travel portals — think Amex Travel or Chase Travel, but tailored to each customer segment. An institution can run distinct experiences for ultra-high-net-worth, premium, mass-market, SMB, and corporate customers on a single code base at no additional cost or maintenance. The portals accept any funding source: points, cash, credit or debit cards, bank-to-bank transfer, buy-now-pay-later, or stablecoins. Whatever the mix, the payment becomes a one-time virtual card that pays the airline, hotel, or OTA in a single transaction. One fintech customer that moved off Expedia saw booking throughput rise more than 400% within 14 months.

Atomic: connectivity without credentials
Atomic, founded in 2019, is best known for direct-deposit switching: a customer connects their payroll account and the bank routes their payroll in a few taps. It has since built three layers: connect (user-permissioned account access), discover (turning account data into insight, such as matching Amazon order history to bank transactions), and act (switching payments, canceling bills, moving a card on file). Atomic works with 250-plus institutions, including nine of the top ten banks and twelve of the top twenty fintechs.

Weinert’s central point was about a trade-off that has constrained the connectivity business for years: the stricter an institution’s security posture, the fewer systems it could connect to. Atomic’s Uplink product resolves it by running the login on the user’s own device. The customer sees the real Netflix, United, or Marriott login page, can use a password manager or Sign in with Apple, and clears multi-factor authentication themselves. Because the session is established on the device using the browser’s native rails — cookies and tokens that Google and Apple designed to be forwarded automatically — credentials never pass through Atomic, Odynn, or the bank. Two consequences follow: the connection is reliable, because if a third party changes its login flow the user sees it and Atomic’s system need not know; and the customer holds control, granting and revoking each connection explicitly. Weinert’s demo put a newly issued card on file at Netflix and Spotify in a few taps.

Why the partnership works
Airlines and hotels are protective of their loyalty programs for the reasons above, and their terms and conditions prohibit anyone from logging in on a member’s behalf. Odynn tried to build this connectivity itself and found it extremely difficult. Atomic’s on-device model is what makes the connection compliant: the member is simply logging in for themselves, and neither Odynn, Atomic, nor the institution can read or store the credential. Weinert observed that the product could not have been built even a year ago. A narrower credential surface also shortens security review and vendor risk assessment.

Traveler DNA®
Patel explained the problem Traveler DNA addresses. Travel rewards have become far more complex since COVID: more transfer partners, more rules, more status tiers, and more benefits attached to more expensive cards. Cardholders feel that annual fees are rising faster than the value they receive, but Odynn’s view is that the value is there — customers simply cannot see it. Benefits sit in program terms, certificates sit in email, and even the programs themselves surface them poorly.
Traveler DNA is Odynn’s answer. As the screenshot below shows, it aggregates every airline and hotel program, every card in the wallet, and the points, miles, status, and real-world travel behavior attached to them into a single loyalty wallet. The data comes from three sources: customer input, AI-driven parsing of the customer’s email for promotions and certificates, and — through Atomic — an optional real-time sync with the loyalty programs themselves.

Figure 2. The Traveler DNA loyalty wallet: program balances, cards, and the three data sources behind them. (Source: Odynn webinar deck.)

Patel’s live demo used his own accounts. The dashboard showed his airline and hotel balances, qualifying-status progress, and reservations, and drew out details a cardholder easily misses: about 280,000 Chase points that transfer to United, sitting alongside a small MileagePlus balance, and a Marriott free-night certificate worth 35,000 points expiring November 7. He then logged in to United through Atomic’s flow, including multi-factor authentication, and the balances and qualifying points refreshed on the spot. The practical use is to prompt the customer — “this certificate expires soon; here are weekend trips on our portal” — which drives a flight or extra nights booked through the institution and reduces breakage. Odynn summarizes the commercial value as fewer abandoned searches, higher redemption and engagement, more repeat usage, and deeper insight into total customer value.

Two final discussion points
• Consumer expectation is the driver. Weinert sees customers demanding that their bank be a hub for their financial life rather than a list of transactions and a balance, and expecting the bank to help them act on that data.
• Assemble rather than build. Banks and issuers can assemble the engagement layer from partners like these rather than building it, and should evaluate vendors on whether credentials ever leave the customer’s device. For fintechs and platforms, loyalty data is becoming a first-class asset for personalization rather than a marketing afterthought. For merchants and loyalty providers, financial institutions are becoming a primary distribution channel with the ability to target by segment.

DCA-CardLinx members can watch the full Zoom recording in our Strategy Center!