Zeal Raises $10 Million for Merchant Loyalty Product

Payments technology firm Zeal, headquartered in the United Kingdom, has secured $10 million in funding to bolster its merchant loyalty product, according to a press release issued on Wednesday, September 9th. The capital infusion will enable Zeal to deploy its technology to more than 4 million card machines over the subsequent two years, according to the release.

The release highlighted the difficulties of establishing customer connections in physical commerce, stating that transactions occurring through payment terminals often fail to generate valuable customer insights for merchants or furnish clear signals for payment providers. Fragmentation was identified as the central issue, as terminal manufacturers, operating settings, payment applications, and acquiring platforms each possess distinct integration prerequisites.

The release explained that connecting this infrastructure to a retailer's loyalty engine or customer data workflows necessitates coordination across the entire payments ecosystem and a facilitated path from the transaction to the systems that can utilize it. Zeal presents a configurable loyalty product tailored for supported payment terminal environments, enabling merchants to award stamps or points, incorporate optional phone number capture, or connect an existing loyalty engine.

The release underscored how payment terminals are progressively evolving into software platforms in addition to acceptance devices, capable of merging loyalty and customer insights with checkout functionalities. The commercial challenge, according to the release, lies in making these capabilities function across fragmented payment environments and delivering them via trusted acquirer relationships.

Although payment platforms possess extensive transaction data, smart checkout is enhancing the worth of merchant information that otherwise remains inaccessible, as reported by PYMNTS on Friday, September 4th. The technology can leverage payment history, customer identity, product information, rewards, past purchases, and transaction performance to dictate what a shopper encounters during checkout.

However, these records do not reside in a single location. Merchants, issuers, processors, and artificial intelligence platforms all hold distinct pieces of data, with data access rapidly becoming an integral aspect of the transaction's economics.