Just by looking at their website, they regard the retailers as their customers, not the individual account holders, which is quite telling, IMO. I think there has been quite a bit of churn in their retail customer base as well, possibly due to a lot of retailers going out of business.
I just noticed going back, that ADS seem to purchase assets with goodwill attached to it even when their business didn’t really show increases YoY, which sort of tells us that this goodwill is not all growth expense. Do they pay their customer upfront when they initiate a customer relationship?