Optimise – Best Managed Affiliate Programme – Enterprise

About Optimise

Optimise is a global partnership marketing company that combines AI-enabled technology, expert teams and local market expertise to help brands and partners achieve their goals. Unlike traditional agencies or standalone SaaS platforms, we bring together technology, strategy and execution for enterprise brands, so they benefit from both powerful AI-driven tools and the specialist support needed to grow, manage, protect and optimise partnership performance at scale. With teams embedded in local markets around the world, we combine global capability with local knowledge to deliver measurable business outcomes.

The challenge

For enterprise brands, growth is rarely just about acquiring more customers. The real challenge is increasing acquisition while maintaining profitability, compliance, data accuracy and customer quality across multiple products and stakeholders.

In financial services, this complexity is amplified by strict regulation, lengthy approval processes and intense competition. Businesses must respond quickly to market changes while ensuring every customer journey, incentive and partner activity remains compliant and commercially sustainable.

For Santander, the challenge was particularly acute. The bank needed to accelerate growth across three separate product lines, while competitors invested heavily in cashback and switching offers, and while launching new products and scaling activity without compromising governance or efficiency.

The solution

The strategic approach

Our approach is built on one principle, that growth, profitability and programme integrity should be pursued together, not treated as trade-offs. We built foundations for scale through robust tracking, compliance and data quality, ensuring decisions are based on accurate performance data. We worked closely with Santander’s marketing, product, risk and compliance teams, aligning affiliate activity to broader business objectives, devising strategy, nurturing publisher partnerships, developing innovative commercial models and executing continuous optimisation to unlock incremental, profitable growth.

The technology deployed

We combined server-to-server tracking, fintech-led pre-approval technology and our proprietary incentive fulfilment solution to improve performance, accuracy and scalability. Alongside this, our team delivered affiliate-specific planning, continuous performance optimisation and commercial innovation, including publisher-specific measurement and more efficient commercial models.

The boldest decision

The single boldest decision was to transform Santander’s approach to incentive-led acquisition by scaling VoucherSent, our proprietary reward fulfilment solution, across multiple products and publishers, rather than treating rewards as a limited tactical channel.

In a highly regulated category, this meant deploying a new operational model across tens of reward campaigns, more than 20 publishers and hundreds of unique publisher URLs, while maintaining compliance and customer experience standards. To make the model commercially sustainable, Optimise also developed a VAT-exempt fulfilment approach that significantly improved ROI. Campaigns were launched within 24 hours, allowing the brand to respond quickly to competitor activity and changing market conditions.

The results

Within 12 months, affiliate sales grew 25% year on year, delivering tens of thousands of new-to-bank customers. Credit Card acquisitions increased 50% year on year, while Current Accounts exceeded target by 14% despite being 64% behind target mid-year. The average CPA reduced by multiple percentage points, improving profitability as performance scaled.

The result we are most proud of is helping Santander achieve its highest-ever affiliate acquisition day. It demonstrates that with the right combination of technology, publisher partnerships and programme management, brands can achieve significant growth without compromising quality, compliance or profitability.