Awin Launches New API to Power Secure, Real-Time Card-Linked Offers
Written by Richard Towey on
A new Proof of Purchase API gives advertisers a faster, more secure way to bring card-linked offers onto their program, with transactions flowing in near real time.
Card-linked offers (CLO) have quickly become one of the fastest-growing partner types on Awin's platform. Today we've made it even easier and more secure to enjoy all the benefits of acquiring customers through some of the world’s biggest financial institutions.
Awin’s new Proof of Purchase API lets CLO partners pass purchase signals securely and in near real time.
For advertisers, it means less manual friction, richer transaction data, and stronger reassurance that the figures flowing into their dashboard are exactly what they claim to be.
A channel outgrowing its own plumbing
CLO's growth has been a key story of the last two years at Awin. Last year was a record one for the partner across sales and revenue, and 2026 is already tracking around 10% ahead of that pace.
Amid rising costs, CLO has become an increasingly smart play for advertisers looking to deliver rewards to consumers that need an incentive to buy with a new brand, or revive their interest in a familiar name.
What are card-linked offers?
CLO are rewards linked directly to a customer’s payment card through banks or third-party financial apps. When a customer activates an offer and completes a purchase with their registered card, they receive cashback, loyalty points, or a similar reward.
That kind of growth brings its own pressure, as the processes that worked at a smaller scale begin to show their limits.
Manual reconciliation, unclear provenance of data, and a lack of consistent security standards across partners are all current challenges. From talking to our advertisers, we found that many want to scale CLO adoption without scaling the operational overhead.
Introducing the Proof of Purchase API
The new API was built with three goals in mind.
First, we wanted to improve security. Every transaction upload is tied to a specific API key, making it traceable back to its source. Awin and our advertisers can suspend access at any time via a simple checkbox, giving direct control over who's submitting data to a program.
Removing friction was another goal. Frequent upload speeds make it possible to process a transaction as soon as your CLO provider gets it from a card issuer. It’s as close to real-time reporting as it gets.
The final aim: carry as much detail about each purchase as possible. We’ve enhanced the range of data points collected by our platform to give you more insight into who redeems your offers. Plus, every CLO transaction is tagged to reflect where it came from, so you can separate them from those captured through standard advertiser tracking.
Charlie Row, UK and BNL Solutions Client Partner, comments: "Our new Proof of Purchase API represents a significant step forward for card-linked offers on Awin. By importing transaction-level data at scale and instantly sharing data, advertisers and CLO partners gain faster, richer insights than ever before.
“The API supports enhanced data points such as Merchant ID (MID), commission group, and customer status (e.g. new vs existing), enabling more accurate attribution, optimization, and reporting. Ultimately, it makes launching and scaling CLO campaigns through Awin simpler, more secure and more data-driven.”
Getting started
If a CLO partner has the API enabled, an advertiser simply switches on "Enable Proof of Purchase API" against that partner in their Awin dashboard.
From that point, transactions begin flowing through automatically and in real time. No manual upload, no reconciliation lag.
If you're already running card-linked offers on your program, reach out to your Awin account contact to check eligibility and get the API enabled. If you haven't added CLO to your program yet, now's a good time to talk to your account manager about what it could unlock.