DNA Payments and Zeal Pilot Loyalty Programme on Terminals

In Short

DNA Payments has started piloting a new loyalty programme for select UK merchants in partnership with Zeal.

The companies say the service turns each in-person card transaction into an identified customer interaction, with fast, simple setup.

What Happened: How DNA Payments Adds Loyalty And Data With Zeal

DNA Payments says the pilot brings “data-driven loyalty” to its card terminals. A card terminal is the card machine a customer taps or inserts to pay.

The service is designed to automatically identify customers and award loyalty at the point of sale. DNA Payments and Zeal say merchants can then see customer patterns through Zeal’s loyalty and reporting tools.

Zeal says it is built as a “data and loyalty layer for card machines.” The partnership aims to help physical retailers close what the companies call an analytics gap between in-person and online payments. The release says online retailers have deep customer data and can see how often customers return and what drives higher spending. It adds that, with DNA Payments, physical retailers can now combine point-of-sale transaction data with Zeal’s customer-level loyalty and reporting suite.

Colin Neil, CEO of DNA Payments, said merchants want to know their customers better, and that the partnership enables “branded loyalty programmes from their card machine,” while also “gathering invaluable purchasing trends.”

Omar Ebeid, founder and CEO of Zeal, said the card machine “sees every customer” but has historically “done nothing with that.” He added that the partnership gives DNA Payments merchants “the ability to know their customers.”

Why It Matters

For merchants that rely heavily on in-person payments, linking purchases to customer identities can make loyalty programmes easier to run and measure.

Zeal has also signalled plans to scale. The release notes that Zeal raised $10 million to support future rollout plans, deepen integrations across payment environments, and expand the tools merchants and payment providers use to understand their businesses.