DNA Payments partners with Zeal to bring data-driven loyalty

The initiative was designed to help merchants transform everyday card transactions into identifiable customer interactions, enabling businesses to better understand customer behaviour and strengthen loyalty programmes with minimal setup requirements.

Through the partnership, physical retailers gained access to customer-level insights typically associated with online commerce. While e-commerce businesses often benefit from detailed customer analytics, including purchase history and spending patterns, many brick-and-mortar retailers have traditionally had limited visibility into customer behaviour.

The new solution combines DNA Payments’ point-of-sale transaction capabilities with Zeal’s loyalty and reporting tools. As customers make purchases, they can be automatically identified, rewarded through loyalty programmes and included in data-driven analytics that help merchants track spending habits and repeat visits.

The partnership aims to bridge the data gap between online and in-store shopping experiences, allowing merchants to use customer insights to improve engagement, increase retention and drive repeat sales.

Colin Neil, CEO of DNA Payments, said, “By partnering with Zeal, we can go a step further, delivering branded loyalty programmes from their card machine, giving customers extra rewards and gathering invaluable purchasing trends. Zeal aligns as the perfect partner to help our point-of-sale customers run their loyalty and rewards programme, as it’s an excellent match for our strategic aims of putting the customer first, and their tech fits seamlessly into existing customer payment journeys on our payment devices.”

Zeal’s technology is integrated directly into payment terminals, allowing loyalty features to operate within the payment process without requiring separate applications or additional hardware.

Omar Ebeid, founder and CEO of Zeal, said, “The card machine is the one device that sees every customer, every day — and until now, it has done nothing with that. DNA Payments shares that vision, and, working together, we are giving their merchants something that has never existed at the point of sale: the ability to know their customers. That changes everything about how a business grows.”

The pilot builds on Zeal’s recent expansion efforts. In September 2026, the company raised $10 million to support future rollouts, expand integrations across payment environments and further develop tools that help merchants and payment providers better understand customer behaviour and business performance.

The collaboration highlights a growing trend within the payments industry, where payment terminals are evolving beyond transaction processing to become platforms for customer engagement, loyalty management and business intelligence.