Client Stories

Client Stories > Business & Professional Services > e-bate

e-bate is a ground-breaking rebate management SaaS provider. The idea for the business came from a team of rebate management specialists and software developers who were building custom rebate solutions. They realized there was a gap in the market for an intelligent rebate solution that married end-to-end management with the clients’ processes. In 2018, e-bate was born.

Challenges and opportunities

After introducing a viable product with tremendous potential, e-bate found it difficult to move from start-up to scale-up. The application was monolithic, with fixed costs; e-bate wanted to make it scalable, with dynamic costs for the customer, and ultimately to move from a transaction-based business to a data company.

Freeman Clarke Principal Matthew Abdy was engaged for six months to serve as CTO, helping e-bate make the transition.

Matthew saw the immense potential of the product: “It’s a very clever way of doing it,” he said. “You can get very complex rebates with e-bate and at the same time provide data and data intelligence. You can get quite interesting insights into buying behavior.”

Solutions and benefits

To make the shift from a transaction-based system to leveraging data streams, Matthew saw the need for transformational changes both in terms of staff and technology.

For the latter, Matthew helped e-bate move to cloud services with AWS, providing more flexibility and scalability.

“A normal solution has a front end, and logic, and a database,” he said. “When you deal with large data sets you move to a stream-based solution.”

With this move, e-bate was able to affordably go from “a couple million” to 50 million transactions per day.

Another recommendation was organizational changes to align the team with the new technology, with retraining and new benchmarks. He augmented the staff with an offshore, third-party team to ensure that customers stayed happy even with the exponential increase in volume.

e-bate has now rewritten the rebate handbook, providing its customers an unprecedented array of services, including:

• ✔️ A real-time calculation engine
• ✔️ Exceptional reporting
• ✔️ Configurable and flexible solutions
• ✔️ An easy-to-use interface
• ✔️ A portal for suppliers and customers

The future

With e-bate’s new platform, costs are lower, whilst they’re still able process the scale and volume of their next generation of customer.

At the same time, e-bate is now becoming a data-centric company. E-bate will move into rebate solutions and provide intelligence into the way products are purchased in bulk. They’ll provide a holistic view of trends and price optimization so buying groups can maximize profits.

Freeman Clarke continues to work with e-bate, now as an IT advisor, providing guidance on their technical roadmap.

“E-bate’s goal ultimately is to delight the customer,” Matthew said. “Every decision we make is with that in mind.”