CardSpring links coupons and customers' credit cards

— -- Visitors to the Turf 'N Surf Po' Boy food truck in Austin earlier this month received discounts on their orders just by paying with their credit card.

That's because a new application from payment platform CardSpring lets users sync their payment card with participating merchants, automatically delivering online coupons and deals offered by the merchant directly to the synched card.

RetailMeNot, the Web's largest coupon code site, launched a test of the technology with food trucks in conjunction with Austin's annual tech conference, South by Southwest, offering deals such as $2 off a $5 purchase at the Po' Boy taco cart.

"We're going to see an evolution of people linking services to their payment card becoming very mainstream behavior," says Eckart Walther, CEO of CardSpring.

RetailMeNot users had the option of linking the food truck coupons to their credit card by providing their card number through the site's mobile app. CardSpring is the platform that then provides the capability for coupon providers, merchants and credit card networks to communicate so that when a customer uses his card to make a purchase, the card is recognized as one that contains a deal; the savings is immediately deducted from the bill.

The technology is the latest "convergence of communication" as retailers continue to look for ways to drive offline sales with digital partnerships, says Joe Skorupa, editor of retail publication RIS News.

But it's not just coupon savings that can be synched with payment cards. Walther envisions eventually being able to sync with applications that deliver digital receipts to a card holder with every purchase or with airline loyalty programs so that a customer's frequent-flier number is recognized each time she pays for a flight.

"Convenience is something all retailers are hoping to provide their customers with," Skorupa says of the synching technology.

CardSpring will gradually roll out its synching application with more than 600 companies in the coming year, but declined to say which companies it's partnering with.

Both Skorupa and Natt Fry, a senior executive in retail at consulting firm Accenture, agree though that the synching technology is in a battle with many other players, including Google, PayPal and several cellphone providers, to win over the way consumers use their "wallets" in the future.

"There's not a major player in this space who's not doing something on this right now," Fry says of developments in digital payment technology. "Everybody doesn't need six mobile wallets. There will be winners and losers."