I used to work in this space, so will explain more about what this actually is.
"Card-linked offers" have existed for a while now, and I know they are supported by at least the Mastercard, Visa and AmEx networks. How it works is:
1. A company that provides the card linked offers goes out and markets to brands that they should provide an offer. The idea is that someone who uses their card at this brand will then get cash back or some discount (e.g. "Sign up to get 10% cash back when you buy from Whataburger.") For the brand it's basically just a new marketing channel.
2. Importantly, the way I've always seen it work is the user must sign up for the discounts, or otherwise sign up for something that says "I want to be eligible for any discounts your platform offers". That is, the cardholder sees a list of promotions, and they then must tap on each one that they want to subscribe to. After that they will get discounts if they shop at those stores.
3. The card-linked-offers provider then gets notified by the card networks when there is an intersection of (a) a cardholder that signed up and (b) shopped at a store that offered a discount.
So to me it looks like Chase is essentially just taking this in house. Whether you think that's a good or bad thing is up to you, but just know that lots of other companies already did this, and these card-linked offers have been enabled by the major card networks for some time.
Vertical integration in this space sounds like a really bad thing to me ("bad" in the sense of "likely to lead to the creation of products that erode human dignity in new and interesting ways").
"Card-linked offers" have existed for a while now, and I know they are supported by at least the Mastercard, Visa and AmEx networks. How it works is:
1. A company that provides the card linked offers goes out and markets to brands that they should provide an offer. The idea is that someone who uses their card at this brand will then get cash back or some discount (e.g. "Sign up to get 10% cash back when you buy from Whataburger.") For the brand it's basically just a new marketing channel.
2. Importantly, the way I've always seen it work is the user must sign up for the discounts, or otherwise sign up for something that says "I want to be eligible for any discounts your platform offers". That is, the cardholder sees a list of promotions, and they then must tap on each one that they want to subscribe to. After that they will get discounts if they shop at those stores.
3. The card-linked-offers provider then gets notified by the card networks when there is an intersection of (a) a cardholder that signed up and (b) shopped at a store that offered a discount.
So to me it looks like Chase is essentially just taking this in house. Whether you think that's a good or bad thing is up to you, but just know that lots of other companies already did this, and these card-linked offers have been enabled by the major card networks for some time.