The funding will help support the rollout of Zeal’s technology to over 4 million card machines over the next two years, per the release.
“Online commerce has built customer relationships around connected transactions, loyalty programs and customer data platforms,” the release said. “In physical commerce, those connections are harder to make. A purchase can pass through a payment terminal without becoming a useful customer insight for the merchant or a clear account signal for the payment provider.”
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The challenge is fragmentation, as terminal manufacturers, operating environments, payment applications and acquiring platforms all have individual integration requirements, according to the release.
“Connecting that infrastructure to a retailer’s loyalty engine or customer data workflows takes more than adding another app at the counter,” the release said. “It requires coordination across the payments ecosystem and a supported route from the transaction to the systems that can use it.”
Zeal is a configurable loyalty product for supported payment terminal environments and allows merchants to arrange stamps or points, add optional phone number capture or connect an established loyalty engine, according to the release.
The funding comes as payment terminals “are becoming software platforms as well as acceptance devices,” able to combine loyalty and customer insight with checkout, per the release.
“The commercial challenge is making those capabilities work across fragmented payment environments and delivering them through trusted acquirer relationships,” the release said.
While payments platforms have plenty of transaction data, “smart checkout is raising the value of the merchant information they do not have,” PYMNTS reported Friday (Sept. 4). “The technology can draw on payment history, customer identity, product information, rewards, previous purchases and transaction performance to determine what a shopper sees at checkout. Those records don’t reside in one place.”
Merchants, issuers, processors and artificial intelligence platforms all have different pieces, with data access quickly “becoming part of the economics of the transaction itself,” the report said.
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