If you want to talk Agentic payments - and it's impacts on merchants (and the MASSIVE opportunity ahead) - reach out to the team. We'd love to discuss.
Loyalty is officially moving to the payment layer. The Adyen x Talon One deal this week for €750M makes that hard to ignore. Most sideline commentators are already calling this a promotions or loyalty move. The truth is, it’s bigger than that. It's a bet on *where* the transaction actually starts, i.e. moving up the value chain. Because on their own, neither loyalty nor payments is effective anymore. Loyalty without payments can’t act. Payments without incentives don’t really influence anything. Put them together and something different happens. For years, merchants have struggled with disconnected data that prevents them from influencing customer behaviors. Payments data exists in one silo, SKU data in another, incentives somewhere else. As a result, merchants measure what customers *did* instead of *shaping what they do next.* A customer buys, earns a point, leaves. The next visit starts from zero. But there is a better way. Take SNIPES, for instance, one of our partners. Once customers hold a balance and earn SNIPES Reserve dollars, AOV and frequency climb up and to the right. Not because of better targeting. The system itself is different. It’s simple. A customer with $80 pre-loaded in a branded wallet just shops differently than one who isn't. They come back faster. They come to the store with joy and more frequency. They spend toward the balance. The incentive is baked into the payment, not bolted on after. Similarly, at Westside Market NYC, the wallet isn’t a layer on top. It is the relationship. Stored value, rewards, and payments are all tied together. The Adyen acquisition is about getting to that layer before the transaction completes: applying the right offer to the right customer at the moment of checkout, using payment data and purchase history together. That's what the promise of the Talon One acquisition is... And it gets more consequential as AI enters the picture. If an AI agent starts handling discovery and checkout, it defaults to whoever already holds the customer's balance. The wallet becomes the shortlist. Merchants with stored value are already in the consideration set. Adyen saw that, and paid €750M for the infrastructure to get there. Everyone else is a cold start. Loyalty and payments are converging - the wallet is the key. At Accrue, we're deploying embedded wallets with our newest cohort of merchants across grocery, retail, and specialty verticals. The pattern holds: once the wallet is live, basket size grows, return frequency increases, and the merchant has a direct relationship with the customer that no platform can intermediate. Same dynamic every time: once the wallet is live, behavior follows quickly. Still early, rife with opportunity for merchants, but the pattern is clear. The future of loyalty is in the balance...