EXCLUSIVE – Payment protection company Earny will soon add Visa to its list of partners in two to four weeks, Bank Innovation has learned.
Discover will also be added to its list of partners. However, no definite timeline for its inclusion could be provided now.
Based in California, Earny files payment protection claims on behalf of its customers.
“Cashback and rewards are important benefits for credit cards, but payment protection is an absolute must,” Dori Yona, COO and co-founder of Earny told Bank Innovation. “This is crucial to the customer, and increasingly every major credit card provides a payment protection policy.”
How does it work? Once a user provides the company with her email by signing up on Earny’s website, Earny can review the cardholder’s purchase history. And when the price of a purchased item drops, Earny automatically files a claim on the customer’s behalf.
Earny is free to sign up. The company makes its money by taking 25% of the claim amount.
Typically, most merchants and credit cards have a price protection policy, usually up to 90 days of the original purchase and, in some cases, as much as 120 days. Most of the major card issuers, such as Mastercard, Visa, Discover, Chase and Citi, have price protection policies. American Express does not have such a policy, Yona noted.
Currently, Earny provides price protection in the retail space for stores such as Amazon, Target, Nordstrom and Walmart, among others. Earny will soon expand into other verticals, Yona said.
“By the end of year, we will enter the travel vertical,” he said. This includes flight fares, car rentals, and hotels.
Another area of interest is insurance.
“The goal is to be number one and fully comprehensive in helping users file and win price protection claims,” he said.
Typically, Earny is able to secure more than 90% of its claims, he said.
The company was established in 2016 after winning Mastercard’s Masters of Code Hackathon. Last May, it raised $1.2 million in seed funding from investors that include Mastercard, Sweet Capital and Science Inc.
The Santa Monica, Calif.-based company has nearly 20 employees. It currently operates only in the U.S.