IRI, a global leader in innovative solutions and services for consumer, retail and media companies, today announced that it has acquired Intelligent Shopper Solutions (ISS), a leading retail consumer insight provider that enables collaboration between retailers and suppliers, from Kognitiv Corporation. As part of the transaction, IRI also entered a partnership agreement with Kognitiv, a B2B technology organisation headquartered in Waterloo, Canada, which is a world leader in collaborative commerce deployed through its unique Platform-as-a-Service.
“We are thrilled to welcome ISS to the IRI family as we continue to invest in our industry-leading capabilities and expertise and build on our track record of successful loyalty collaboration programs,” said Andrew Appel, president and CEO of IRI.
“The addition of ISS expands IRI’s platform to provide CPG clients a more complete view of consumer shopping habits across even more leading retailers. Further, the talented ISS team brings deep expertise in providing rich, loyalty-based consumer behavioural insights, which we look forward to leveraging, along with our unparalleled data assets from more than 500 million loyalty cards, to deliver enhanced collaboration and growth for IRI clients. We also look forward to our ongoing partnership with Kognitiv, which will create new opportunities for collaboration with our clients, assisting them deliver increased value to their consumers.”
ISS became part of Kognitiv following the combination of Aimia Inc.’s Loyalty Solutions business with Kognitiv in 2020. ISS brings extensive retail consumer insights expertise and a cloud-based software platform with capabilities and retailer relationships that are highly complementary to IRI’s existing offerings. ISS’s platform processes sales and loyalty program data from retailers and allows users to easily review performance and generate actionable insights that inform merchandising and marketing decisions. ISS also offers a proprietary behavioral segmentation tool that creates customer segments based on shopping behaviour.
With the addition of ISS, IRI is an even stronger and more differentiated loyalty solutions partner for clients:
- IRI clients will benefit from enhanced consumer insight expertise and capabilities that ISS brings to further support IRI’s existing loyalty products and gateways; and
- IRI clients will benefit from the deep talent of the ISS team in developing truly customer-centric retail experiences.
- IRI will be better positioned to serve a broader footprint of global clients by adding ISS gateways with leading retailers across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific.
In the near term, ISS will operate a stand-alone operating subsidiary of IRI. Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.
In addition to the acquisition of ISS, IRI has entered into an innovation and marketing partnership with Kognitiv. Through this partnership, IRI retailer clients will have the opportunity to leverage Kognitiv’s unique Platform-as-a-Service to scale their partnerships, connect peer-to-peer and deliver new value to consumers through hyper-personalised experiences within their ecosystem.
“As part of IRI, ISS will be well positioned to continue offering best-in-class solutions and capabilities and drive more differentiated growth for CPG retailers and suppliers around the world,” said Peter Schwartz, founder and executive chairman of Kognitiv.
“Partnering with IRI makes tremendous sense as we share a common belief in the strategic application of big data, particularly zero-party data, to drive new opportunities for our clients and new value for their most important consumers. This partnership will allow Kognitiv to accelerate our vision for collaborative commerce and bring a unique and complementary set of capabilities to both organisations.”
