Wellness benefits administered via prepaid cards or marketplaces tend to have rigid restrictions that decrease utilization. JOON is engineered to be flexible and inclusive in order to meet the diverse needs of your workforce.

How card-connected benefits works

JOON leverages card-connected technology powered by Plaid. Benefits recipients connect a personal card for benefits-related purchases and a bank account for reimbursements. Purchases are automatically reviewed for eligibility for direct deposit reimbursement.

There are significant advantages to this approach:

• Benefits recipients don’t need to adopt new behaviors. They can connect and use their preferred card(s) without having to remember to do something different before each purchase.
• Unlike prepaid cards that have spending limits that cause large purchases to be rejected, recipients can make any purchase and be reimbursed up to their allowance limit.
• Benefits recipients aren’t limited to a restrictive list of merchants. JOON works with any merchant in the world and will determine eligibility based on benefits program criteria. Rather than rejecting purchases at the point of sale, JOON’s classification system continuously gets smarter.

Connected cards enables a more seamless and secure experience. JOON is given read-only access and does not have access to any financial information external to the connected cards. Learn more about data privacy and security here.

Marking purchases as eligible

JOON’s purchase classifier automatically determines the eligibility of purchases based on your company’s specific benefits program criteria.

This is a two-step verification process:

1. Every purchase includes a merchant category (e.g. “Fitness Center”) and a merchant name (e.g. “Equinox”). If the merchant category fits within your benefits category, it is marked for eligibility.
2. The second step checks the merchant name to confirm eligibility. This step serves two purposes: (i) as a backup because sometimes the category is unknown or for whatever reason not clearly eligible, (ii) your program may have specific merchants that you want to be eligible or ineligible.

JOON’s purchase classifier continues to improve as more purchases are made through the platform. Whenever a purchase is marked as eligible when it shouldn’t be or vice versa, the classifier stores that information for future use.

<aside> 💡 At this time, JOON cannot make a distinction based on what the purchase was actually for, in that we do not have access to SKU data on a receipt. For example, our purchase classifier does not know whether a Whole Foods purchase was for fruits and vegetables or toilet paper. Therefore, JOON is more likely to automatically mark a purchase as eligible when it’s directly from brands (e.g. “Headspace”) than from box retailers (e.g. “Walmart”). See the next section to learn more about how employees can upload receipts to request approval for eligible purchases from anywhere.

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Misclassified purchases

JOON has a comprehensive and continuously-improving purchase classification system. However, for the following reasons, a purchase may be misclassified as eligible when it shouldn’t be:

• The merchant intentionally or unintentionally misclassified themselves when configuring their credit card payment processing. For example, sometimes a smoothie bar within a fitness center will misclassify themselves as fitness.
• The merchant name included a keyword that automatically marked it as eligible. For example, our classification engine might misclassify a restaurant with the name “Fitness Foods” as a gym.
• There was a bug in our classification engine.

If you come across a purchase you believe is misclassified, please contact your JOON account manager immediately so that we can update our purchase classification system moving forward.