BHN expands partnership with Extole to Power Next Generation Referral Marketing Programmes and Rewards in the UK
London, UK – June 2nd, 2025– Blackhawk Network (BHN) today announced the seamless integration of its robust digital rewards solutions with Extole’s customer engagement platform, delivering a powerful go-to-market approach designed to help brands increase lifetime value.
With business facing increasingly rising customer acquisition costs, this enhanced offering is particularly valuable for retailers, banks, travel companies, and hospitality brands seeking to elevate customer acquisition, retention, and loyalty. By combining BHN’s scalable portfolio of top brands and retailers with Extole’s industry-leading referral and engagement programmes, businesses can now deliver timely Refer-a-Friend incentives giving brands personalised, locally relevant rewards to fuel growth and engagement.
Extole enables customer-led marketing programmes such as refer-a-friend, ambassador, and welcome offers. Incentives can be tailored for different groups—customers, employees, sales agents, or partners—helping brands cut paid media costs by building stronger relationships and automating programme management.
With BHN’s digital rewards suite, brands can offer a variety of incentives, from eGift codes to prepaid cards and multi-retailer options, supported by BHN’s global and local network of brands.
As a leading global payments brand, BHN further strengthens the partnership with their extensive experience in supporting some of the UK’s best-known brands with innovative reward and incentive solutions.
“Businesses are under stress from exorbitant acquisition costs,” said Matt Roche, CEO of Extole. “With this expanded partnership, we’re combining BHN’s extensive reward footprint with Extole’s market-leading referral platform to deliver a proven, scalable solution for UK brands to drive profitable growth."
“BHN’s customer reward research showed that companies using reward-based promotions enjoy 58% greater year-on-year increase in annual revenue, so we are confident that by optimising refer-a-friend programmes through this partnership with Extole represents an effective opportunity for businesses under to increase productivity and return to growth, said Chris Ronald, BHN Region Head for Payments, Incentives and Rewards “
BHN and Extole announced their partnership in the US market, in October 2023.
About BHN
Today, through BHN’s single global platform, businesses of all kinds can tap into the world’s largest network of branded payment solutions. BHN helps businesses grow revenue, increase loyalty, motivate and reward their teams, disburse funds and engage consumers. Branded payment solutions include the issuance and distribution of gift cards, egifts, corporate payouts and rewards, along with the technology to deliver these products in seamless, integrated ways. BHN’s network spans the globe with more than 400,000 consumer touchpoints. Learn more at https://blackhawknetwork.com/uk-en. BHN owns One4all, a leading multi-retailer gift card.
About Extole
Extole is the Customer-led Growth platform. With Extole, marketers fight skyrocketing paid media costs by turning their customers into a primary source for acquisition, awareness, and activation. With Extole’s SaaS platform and expert services, marketers rapidly launch programs such as refer-a-friend, ambassador, and welcome programs, personalized to important behavioral segments. Customer-Led Growth drives revenue, lowers customer acquisition cost, and generates an important source of first-party data. To date, Extole boasts 500+ customers at leading enterprise brands, 30+B events per day via 1.4B consumer relationships. Learn more at Extole.com
