The loyalty layer that digital wallets haven't unlocked yet
Digital wallets have solved the transaction. Now they must unlock loyalty.
Digital wallets are having a moment. With 4.5 billion consumers using them in 2025, roughly half of all digital payment volume globally, adoption has moved from "promising" to present.
The industry case for wallets has largely been made on conversion grounds: less friction at checkout, biometric authentication that cuts fraud without adding steps, and a familiar logo that transfers consumer trust to merchants who might not have had the chance to earn it themselves.
All of these are meaningful gains for merchants, especially global businesses transacting millions daily.
Digital wallets now account for 83% of global digital payment volume, while 42% of consumers prefer digital wallets for cross-border payments over banks or wires.
Still, the more interesting question for enterprise merchants is what wallet infrastructure makes possible beyond the initial transaction. The answer may well lie in customer loyalty and using digital wallets to turn one-off buyers into lifelong brand advocates that keep coming back.
The missing infrastructure behind customer loyalty
The role of loyalty in business performance is hard to overstate. Loyalty retention ranks as the top KPI for most corporations, ahead of sales growth and lifetime value. Studies show that 75% of consumers favor brands with rewards programs, while 68% of millennials avoid brands without them. And yet, the average business can lose between 20 and 30 percent of its customer base annually to silent churn, much of it driven by rewards that couldn't be redeemed where customers actually shop.
The programs exist, of course, but the infrastructure to make them feel seamless and genuinely rewarding across every channel a customer actually shops in is still largely missing. That gap is one of the more important commercial signals in payments right now. Merchants who close that gap see that the repeat spend among recognized customers typically runs 15 to 25 percent higher. This might not sound like much, but when you compare that rate to the average year-on-year revenue growth of 8 to 12 percent for enterprise ecommerce merchants, it’s easy to see that loyalty is an asset that merchants should tap into.
Why loyalty and payments keep missing each other
The structural problem is familiar to anyone managing a loyalty program at scale. Points accumulate in one system, while payment history lives in another. The customer who spent $800 on a hotel stay gets no recognition when they order a drink at the bar downstairs, because the bar runs on a different system. The connection between spending behavior and reward experience is inconsistent at best, and invisible at worst.
Today's loyalty programs largely exist alongside payments rather than within them. The checkout and the reward are two separate events, often managed by two separate vendors, reconciled after the fact. Starbucks Rewards points earned in-app, for example, cannot be redeemed at a third-party checkout using Apple Pay. The value is real, but the infrastructure can't move it to where the customer actually is. This just one example of how a siloed approach to loyalty is more a payments infrastructure problem than a program design problem.
What a unified loyalty layer actually looks like
The architecture that turns loyalty into a revenue driver for merchants is not yet another new loyalty platform. Rather, it’s a payments infrastructure layer that treats identity, spending history, and reward value as a system that follows the customer across every channel and doesn't reset at each new touchpoint.
For enterprise merchants, the wallet's real value proposition beyond the tap-to-pay moment is the token that sits beneath it - that single customer identity that travels across channels, recognizes spend in real time, and turns loyalty from a separate program into a unified experience.
Thanks to built-in wallet tokenization, a high-frequency shopper can unlock a personalized discount at a self-serve terminal without opening an app or presenting a card. Or a VIP guest can receive a room upgrade offer at hotel checkout based on cumulative spend recognized across properties. The system can recognize who a customer is and what they've earned, in real time, wherever they transact (in-store, online, mobile, kiosk, or self-checkout).
In the next several years, we’ll see wallet-based programs, where a customer can store value in their wallet, fund it multiple ways, accumulate loyalty across the stores they shop in, and then use those rewards across other brands. When wallets have built-in loyalty like that, consumers get a single place where spending history, rewards, and payment options converge. The merchant, in return, gets a customer who is more engaged, more identifiable, and more likely to return.
Where the industry is pointing and who's getting close
The interesting development in this space is the convergence between wallet infrastructure and banking-as-a-service platforms, particularly in Europe, where app-based banks have built the kind of customer relationships and data layers that traditional payment rails never could.
PayPal's rewards model (PayPal+) aggregates cashback and points across partners including Walmart and Uber, redeemable at checkout across those merchants. The retention signal is showing up in transaction behavior: 74% of PayPal's BNPL transactions now come from repeat shoppers, which becomes possible when a wallet functions as a loyalty layer rather than just a payment method.
Revolut, operating across 45 million users, is already layering cashback and category rewards on top of its wallet and banking infrastructure, positioning itself as a cross-merchant loyalty layer.
Alipay in China aggregates loyalty points from thousands of merchants into a single wallet view, allowing users to earn and redeem rewards across retail, dining, and rideshares, driving 20 to 30 percent higher repeat spend via real-time spend history.
Klarna's app combines buy-now-pay-later with cashback rewards from partner brands, applying personalized offers based on prior spend, lifting customer retention by 25% in integrated European markets.
For enterprise merchants, wallet providers that solve the loyalty layer will become significantly more valuable as commercial partners.
What this requires from payments infrastructure
Making loyalty work at this integrated level requires the same approach that makes cross-border wallet acceptance work well in the first place: an infrastructure layer that absorbs the complexity so merchants don't have to manage it themselves.
The infrastructure underneath needs to do several things simultaneously. It needs to recognize the customer consistently through a persistent token that survives channel switches. It needs to aggregate spend in real time, not through batch reconciliation that reflects yesterday's behavior. And it needs to make that aggregated value available at the point of transaction.
Infrastructure platforms like Nuvei are already applying the same logic that underpins local wallet acceptance by absorbing complex routing, tokenization, and settlement layers so merchants don't have to manage them directly. Nuvei's Control Panel data and reporting layer gives merchants a clearer view of transaction history, customer behavior, and repeat spend across channels.
When merchants can see when customers pay, how they pay, how much they spend, and where wallet preference appears over card usage, payments become a source of loyalty insight as well as revenue. That allows them to steer behavior toward lower-cost methods, build targeted promotions around real usage patterns, and reward high-value customers based on what they actually do, not merely what they signed up for, as in the case with most third-party loyalty programs.
The result is less a loyalty bolt-on and more a payment data foundation for the program itself.
What wallet-integrated loyalty means for finance teams
For controllers and treasury teams, the added loyalty dimension simplifies reconciliation. When loyalty programs are built into wallets themselves, liabilities are tracked against real transaction data, settlement timing becomes predictable, and the operational overhead that currently makes cross-channel loyalty programs expensive becomes an automated function.
In the next two to three years, we'll see increased competition and innovation in this space, which will benefit consumers and merchants alike.
But the businesses best positioned to benefit will be those who don't wait for wallet providers to solve loyalty on their behalf.
At Nuvei, we see loyalty and payment convergence as a natural next step: one where infrastructure, not individual programs, becomes the bridge that keeps customers coming back - for every business, everywhere.
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