GLOBAL

Loyalty In Retail: The Future of Loyalty Is in Your Shopping Basket

A new item-level, real-time loyalty model is emerging that connects brands, merchants, banks, and consumers to deliver instant, personalized rewards at checkout—an innovation driven by FIS’s Smart Basket platform.

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GLO

For decades, loyalty programmes have promised stronger connections between consumers and the companies that serve them. In reality, many of those programmes have become fragmented, costly, and underperforming. Merchants pay for points that don’t translate into repeat visits, brands fund promotions without real behavioural insight, banks fight for “top-of-wallet” status, and customers accumulate rewards that are rarely redeemed.

FIS, one of the world’s largest providers of financial and payments technology, believes the solution isn’t to tear everything down, but to rebuild it around shared data and collaboration. Its new Smart Basket platform aims to reconnect all stakeholders — banks, merchants, brands, and shoppers — at the item level, transforming how rewards are created and redeemed.

A System Out of Sync

According to David Keenan, Global Head of Payment Networks at FIS, the problem with today’s loyalty ecosystem is misalignment. Each player—retailers, card issuers, and product brands—runs separate reward programmes, often without visibility into what actually changes consumer behaviour.

“Everyone’s trying to reward the same purchase,” Keenan noted in a recent discussion. “But they’re doing it independently, which means no one sees the full picture of the customer journey.”

This fragmentation creates duplicated costs and data silos. Brands fund campaigns they can’t measure; merchants offer discounts that may not build long-term loyalty; and financial institutions distribute points without knowing whether the spend would have occurred anyway. The outcome: loyalty that feels less like a relationship and more like a transactional rebate.

From Revolution to Evolution

Rather than proposing a complete overhaul, FIS advocates an “evolutionary” approach. The principles of loyalty—rewarding engagement, encouraging repeat behaviour, and recognising preference—still work. What’s missing, Keenan argues, is a unified infrastructure that can connect these stakeholders in real time.

That infrastructure is embodied in the Smart Basket, a technology layer that attaches data and value to each individual product purchased. Every item scanned at checkout can now carry its own micro-reward—funded by the brand, surfaced by the merchant, facilitated by the card issuer, and delivered instantly to the consumer.

By working at the SKU (stock-keeping unit) level rather than the transaction level, Smart Basket gives unprecedented precision. It lets a shampoo manufacturer reward a shopper directly for choosing its brand, even when the purchase happens through a third-party retailer and is paid for with a loyalty-linked debit or credit card.

Loyalty Where People Actually Shop

The promise of this approach is to make loyalty frictionless. Consumers no longer need to remember promo codes or manually redeem points; the benefit is embedded in the transaction itself.

A brand could, for instance, automatically discount an eligible product in a shopper’s basket. The consumer experiences an instant, visible reward; the brand verifies that its promotional funding drove a confirmed sale; and the merchant benefits from increased throughput and customer satisfaction.

For financial institutions, the integration offers another advantage: a reason for cardholders to use a particular payment method more frequently. When every purchase has the potential to earn or redeem rewards instantly, the card stays “top of wallet.”

Creating an Ecosystem of Shared Incentives

At its core, Smart Basket is about alignment. It replaces the traditional, siloed model of loyalty with one built on shared incentives. Keenan describes it as an ecosystem where “every participant—the buyer, the seller, and the brand—wants the same outcome: to build stronger, more transparent loyalty relationships.”

By sharing data at the item level, participants can coordinate promotions, measure effectiveness, and refine engagement strategies. Brands can direct rewards toward specific SKUs or customer segments; merchants can tailor offers based on in-store or online patterns; and issuers can integrate these offers seamlessly within their payment apps.

Built on Proven Infrastructure

What makes the Smart Basket approach credible is that it isn’t just a conceptual framework. FIS is leveraging existing, production-grade infrastructure from its payment and retail systems already operating at scale worldwide.

According to Keenan, the company is combining three mature FIS technologies that already manage item-level transactions and applying them to the loyalty space. This allows the firm to move quickly without the risk or cost associated with building from scratch.

In doing so, FIS mirrors the same evolution seen in payments over the past decade: moving from isolated, card-based transactions to connected digital ecosystems. Loyalty, in this view, follows the same path—from fragmented to federated, from static to intelligent, and from delayed to real-time.

Why It Matters

The Smart Basket initiative reflects a broader industry trend: loyalty is becoming data-driven, omnichannel, and collaborative. Retailers and financial institutions increasingly recognise that shared infrastructure can create a multiplier effect—where the same funding dollar delivers value to all participants.

For consumers, the impact could be even more tangible. Instead of juggling multiple programmes with separate logins, points, and redemption rules, shoppers could experience loyalty seamlessly, directly within their normal shopping flow.

As Keenan summarised, “Loyalty shouldn’t feel like a separate destination. It should exist where people already shop, pay, and live.”

GLO Take:

FIS’s Smart Basket doesn’t try to reinvent loyalty—it connects the dots between those who fund it, deliver it, and experience it. By shifting focus from isolated programmes to shared, item-level engagement, the company aims to restore what loyalty was meant to be: a genuine exchange of value that rewards everyone in the ecosystem.

Source: FIS