Travel rewards are one of the most powerful incentives in modern finance. Credit cards compete on points, airlines rely heavily on loyalty programs, and banks increasingly see travel experiences as a key driver of engagement.
Yet the infrastructure behind those systems has barely evolved.
John Taylor Garner, founder and CEO of fintech startup Odynn, believes the entire ecosystem is overdue for modernization.
“We like to describe Odynn as embedded travel loyalty infrastructure,” Garner explains. “We control and power the pipes for travel loyalty redemption flows, bookings, and everything needed in a modern card stack.”
In other words, Odynn sits behind the scenes, powering the travel booking and loyalty redemption systems inside banks, fintech apps, and credit card platforms. If the company succeeds, millions of users may book flights and hotels through their banking apps without ever realizing Odynn is the technology enabling it.
From Wall Street Trading to Travel Infrastructure
Garner did not begin his career in travel.
Before founding Odynn, he spent five years as a volatility trader at Merrill Lynch, building models designed to identify arbitrage opportunities in financial markets.
“In trading, my focus was building algorithms to find arbitrage opportunities and figure out where capital should be deployed,” he says.
That background shaped how he saw the loyalty economy.
“Points, miles, and dollars are just different currencies,” Garner explains. “At the end of the day, it’s the same concept applied in a different market.”
The travel rewards ecosystem, he realized, was effectively a fragmented financial system with fluctuating valuations, opaque pricing, and enormous inefficiencies.
Those inefficiencies eventually became the foundation for Odynn.
The Pivot That Sparked Odynn
Garner’s first startup in the space was Card Curator, a consumer platform designed to help users maximize credit card rewards and loyalty points.
The idea was simple: give consumers tools to optimize their points, miles, and spending across credit cards.
But the pandemic changed everything.
COVID dramatically reduced travel demand, making a consumer travel optimization platform difficult to sustain. At the same time, Garner began noticing a deeper structural shift within the travel industry.
Airlines and hotels were abandoning fixed reward pricing in favor of dynamic loyalty pricing, meaning the number of points required for flights and hotel stays fluctuated constantly.
That shift created a major problem for banks and credit card issuers.
Many power users rely on transferring bank points into airline or hotel programs. But if customers can no longer easily predict redemption values, they are less likely to engage with loyalty systems.
“We realized that this was going to cause massive headaches for banks,” Garner says. “If customers can’t understand the cost of flights and hotels anymore, they’ll transfer their points less frequently and engagement will drop.”
At that moment, Garner saw a larger opportunity.
Rather than building tools for consumers, he could build infrastructure for financial institutions.
That pivot became Odynn.
Why Travel Portals Feel Stuck in the Past
Anyone who has booked travel through a credit card portal has likely noticed the experience feels dated.
According to Garner, the problem is structural.
“You’re sitting at the intersection of two very slow-moving industries,” he says. “Financial institutions move slowly. Airlines and hotels move even slower.”
Modernizing systems across both sectors simultaneously is extremely difficult.
Even basic technical integrations remain surprisingly rare.
“In many cases the APIs don’t even exist,” Garner says. “Even if you offered to pay for them, they’d say it would take three or four years to build.”
As a result, Odynn has had to build large portions of the infrastructure itself.
“We’re basically dragging the industry kicking and screaming into the 21st century,” Garner says.
Turning Banking Apps Into Travel Platforms
Odynn’s long-term vision extends far beyond improving travel portals.
Garner believes banks and fintech companies are evolving into lifestyle platforms, offering services that extend well beyond traditional financial products.
Travel plays a central role in that transformation.
“For millennials and Gen Z, travel is the largest expense outside of housing,” Garner says.
As younger generations prioritize experiences over material ownership, travel has become a core part of their spending habits.
“If you’re building a lifestyle platform and you don’t have travel,” Garner says, “it’s not really a lifestyle business.”
Odynn enables banks and fintech platforms to embed full travel marketplaces directly inside their apps.
From the consumer perspective, the experience should feel seamless.
“When you’re booking travel inside your financial app, you won’t realize another company is powering it,” Garner explains. “You’ll assume it’s native to the bank.”
Behind the scenes, Odynn’s system manages loyalty balances, reward valuations, travel inventory, and booking mechanics.
Personalizing Loyalty With Machine Learning
Odynn has incorporated machine learning into its platform long before the recent wave of AI hype.
The company’s models help determine how users should optimally redeem rewards.
“We’ve been using machine learning for years to power personalized recommendations,” Garner says.
For example, the system can determine whether a user should redeem points directly, transfer them to an airline partner, or pay with cash.
“We can tell users where it makes sense to use miles, where to transfer points, and where it’s better to just pay cash,” Garner explains.
More recently, Odynn has launched an AI-powered travel concierge that allows users to plan and book trips through conversational interfaces.
Unlike most AI travel tools, which redirect users to third-party booking sites, Odynn’s platform enables native booking within the experience.
“Most AI travel tools emulate a human clicking through another website,” Garner says. “What we’ve built actually allows booking directly inside the system.”
That capability, he believes, will play an important role in the future of AI-driven commerce.
The Shopify Model for Travel Portals
Garner often describes Odynn as “the Shopify for travel portals.”
Just as Shopify provides the infrastructure behind millions of online stores, Odynn provides a shared infrastructure layer that allows banks and fintech companies to launch customized travel platforms.
“All of our customers run on the same core code base,” Garner explains. “But every solution is tailored to that customer and their specific users.”
A large bank, for example, might operate multiple travel platforms simultaneously.
Private wealth clients, small businesses, and mass-market customers all have different travel behaviors and loyalty needs.
Odynn’s infrastructure allows banks to run multiple versions of a travel portal while maintaining a single underlying system.
The result is greater personalization without additional complexity.
A Quiet Infrastructure Play
While companies like Expedia, Booking.com, and Hopper dominate consumer travel booking, Odynn is focused on a different layer of the ecosystem.
Instead of competing for travelers directly, the company is building the infrastructure that enables banks and fintech platforms to compete in travel themselves.
If Garner’s vision plays out, the next generation of travel booking may not happen on traditional travel websites at all.
It may happen inside the apps people already use to manage their money.
And powering that shift could be a startup quietly rebuilding the pipes of the global loyalty economy.
