Citigroup's ThankYou Chief Nancy Gordon Leaves to Join Card-Points Startup
Citigroup Inc.’s Nancy Gordon, head of the ThankYou credit-card points network, has left the bank after 12 years to join a startup business with a patent for aggregating customer-loyalty programs.
Gordon, 41, quit in July and joined Miami-based Signature Systems LLC as chief operating officer earlier this month, she said in an interview. Signature Systems, led by founder and inventor Richard Postrel, will create “a promotional wallet” that will help customers combine points from their loyalty programs, she said. The firm may start taking business in late 2011 or early 2012, she said.
Gordon, who joined New York-based Citigroup as assistant vice president of marketing in 1998, said she began the ThankYou program in 2004, which gives Citigroup card users points that can be redeemed for goods and services including books, tools and flights. The average American belongs to 14 such programs, said Gordon, who previously worked as an account supervisor for Ogilvy & Mather, the public relations firm owned by WPP Plc.
“She’s going to be running the company in terms of bringing it to market,” said Postrel, 58, in an interview. “We made her an offer she couldn’t refuse.”
Postrel is listed as the inventor on at least 16 patents for technologies relating to rewards systems since 2003, according to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. He said he was an arbitrage trader with J. Aron & Co. He left before that firm was acquired by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. in 1981, he said.
Postrel and Gordon declined to say how much funding Signature Systems had received.
“Nancy has been a valued member of the Citi cards business and a key member of the team that built ThankYou into one of the industry’s leading reward networks,” Citigroup spokesman Samuel Wang said in a statement. “We wish her every success in her future endeavors.”
To contact the reporters on this story: Donal Griffin in New York at dgriffin10@bloomberg.net; Bradley Keoun in New York at bkeoun@bloomberg.net.
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