ST. PETERSBURG, Fla., Sept. 17, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- CNBC contributor, market analyst, investor and entrepreneur, Jon Najarian, has joined SKUxchange’s growing advisory board alongside other industry leaders and former executives from P&G, Walmart, JPMorgan, Coca-Cola, and Inmar.

Headquartered in the greater Tampa Bay area, SKUxchange is a blockchain-based software company that partners with brands, retailers, online marketplace platforms, and service providers across multiple industries to deliver smart and secure digital offers. The company’s mission is to eliminate promotional offer fraud, while driving transparency through smart data and AI-driven offers. SKUx proves ROI with near real-time offer reconciliation and settlement for their enterprise partners.

“SKUx has put together an all-star team that is solving critical issues brands and retailers face as it pertains to promotional offers. A great amount of my career has been spent analyzing and tracking disruptive companies and new technologies; technologies such as blockchain, payment technologies, AI - all of which SKUx is using to finally bring transparency to this trillion-dollar industry,” Najarian said. “I couldn’t be more thrilled to join the team.”

How It Works: No Clearinghouse Required

SKUx’s blockchain-based software platform is eliminating wasteful processes and costs that occur in the current clearinghouse model, many of which require physical offers to be hand-counted for reconciliation and settlement. These manual processes significantly slow down payment distribution between parties and ultimately introduce fraud into the promotional offer ecosystem.

In contrast, by leveraging new technologies such as blockchain and AI, SKUx’s patent-pending technology enables brands, retailers, online marketplace platforms, and service providers to eliminate offer fraud while driving transparency and assuring their ROI – therefore, resulting in greater savings for consumers. 

This is done through a simple API where SKUx’s brand partners submit promotional offer content into a shared blockchain database. Each offer is then serialized through SKUx and distributed by SKUx’s partner retailers, online marketplace platforms, and service providers; allowing brands to track their promotional offers across industry verticals in real-time, ubiquitously recognized at any point-of-sale.

“SKUx is going to scale very fast; it’s one of the many reasons I joined the Board of Advisors, to utilize my voice and platform to help position the company as it grows and redefines this industry,” Najarian said.

The company’s co-founder and executive vice president, Bobby Tinsley, added:

“We are honored to be working with such a well-respected thought leader and financial industry voice in Jon Najarian. Jon brings an incredible amount of knowledge from a global market perspective to SKUxchange; his insights will be extremely valuable to us as we scale.”

About Jon Najarian

Jon “DRJ” Najarian was linebacker for the Chicago Bears before he turned to another kind of contact sport – trading on the Chicago Board Options Exchange.

He became a member of the CBOE, NYSE, CME and CBOT and worked as a floor trader for some 25 years.

In 1990 he founded Mercury Trading, a market-making firm at the Chicago Board Options Exchange (CBOE), which he sold in 2004 to Citadel, one of the world’s largest hedge funds.

During that time Jon developed the Heat Seeker™ algorithm and framework used to identify unusual activity in stock, options and futures. He still uses it to this day to identify unusual option activity on CNBC.

In 2005, Najarian co-founded, together with his brother Pete, optionMONSTER, an options news and education firm, and tradeMONSTER, a leading online brokerage firm, that for years has been rated “Best for Options Traders” by Barron’s and was the first online broker to deploy streaming, desktop-like trading in a web browser. Jon and Pete took on private equity firm General Atlantic Partners as a partner in 2014, ultimately selling TradeMonster to E*Trade for $750 million in 2016.

Today Jon is a professional investor and market analyst, who publishes his market observations and trade ideas on Investitute.com, his financial education and newsletter services company. Over the years he has authored four best-selling books on trading and options.

Jon co-founded Najarian Advisors & Najarian Family Office that advises or trades for institutional investors and provides money management for wealthy investors. He has delivered keynotes for The NYSE, Euromoney, Institutional Investor, Blockchain Shift & HighTower Advisers. He also is the co-founder of TCB Productions LLC, a production company for television programs and movies.

About SKUxchange

SKUxchange is unlocking lost value across the trillion-dollar promotional offer industry through its smart and secure digital offers powered by blockchain.

SKUx’s technology offers near real-time reconciliation and settlement while leveraging the power of blockchain and AI to improve security, transparency and efficiency of promotional offers. The company has been quietly collaborating with industry thought leaders and has assembled key distribution partnerships that will enable SKUxchange to scale quickly as volume increases.

Please visit www.skux.io to learn more.

Media Contact

Vinh Vuong
vinh@vuonginc.com
+1 646-946-2176

A photo accompanying this announcement is available at https://www.globenewswire.com/NewsRoom/AttachmentNg/0f60e70a-74e5-4bb6-b35d-d80b06b634fa