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Introduction
What is the Publisher Software?
The Publisher software is an internal service that manages advertising delivery and reward programs for your members. It stores your audience data, delivers relevant deals, tracks card transactions, and manages wallet state (cashbacks, loyalty stamps).
Think of it as a microservice in your backend stack. Your applications communicate with it via HTTP API calls, the same way they might talk to any other internal service. It is not user-facing - it does not handle end-user authentication, serve web pages, or expose a public API to your customers.
How It Fits Into Your Business
You are a bank, card issuer, fintech, or loyalty platform. Your end-users make card transactions every day. You want to offer them relevant cashback deals and loyalty programs - surfaced within your existing apps and experiences.
The Publisher software makes this possible:
- A banking app shows cashback offers in the transactions feed or in a dedicated rewards section. When a customer "clips" a deal, the deal is saved to their wallet. When they make a qualifying purchase, cashback is credited automatically.
- A loyalty app displays nearby deals on a map. Members enroll in stamp-card programs and earn rewards as they shop.
- A fintech sends push notifications about new offers based on a member's spending patterns and attributes.
In all of these cases, the Publisher software sits behind your product - managing the data, running the targeting logic, and communicating with the K42 Platform - while your own software handles the user experience.
Responsibilities
| Your software | Publisher software |
|---|---|
| User-facing apps (mobile, web) | Member and audience storage |
| End-user authentication and sessions | Deal delivery and audience targeting |
| UX, design, notifications | Transaction identifier computation |
| Proxying relevant API calls to the Publisher | Wallet state (cashbacks, stamps, clips) |
| Ingesting transactions from your payment systems | Communication with the K42 Platform |
| Deciding what to show users and when | Syncing deal configurations and creatives |
Relationship to the K42 Platform
Deals, campaigns, and targeting rules are configured on the K42 Platform by advertisers and operators. The Publisher software syncs this configuration periodically and executes delivery logic locally. When transactions match active deals, the Platform sends webhook events back to trigger rewards.
You do not need to interact with the K42 Platform directly for day-to-day operations. The Publisher software handles this communication on your behalf.
For more detail on how the systems interact, see the Platform Overview.