A Payment Solution With Loyalty Programs That Help Merchants Turn Transactions Into Engagement Tools

In a Nutshell: There’s no turning back the trend that has customers everywhere clamoring for more and better ways to pay without cash. Thanks to Nayax, the current revolution in cashless and contactless payments comes with built-in loyalty capabilities, including dynamic pricing and management tools for real-time transaction visibility and data insights. With Nayax handling payments, merchants of all sizes gain a flexible, scalable payment solution that works everywhere. Nayax turns payments from a necessary function into a catalyst for business growth and stronger customer loyalty.

How you pay for goods and services is one of those things you don’t think about until you have to. Consumers generally aren’t interested in the nuts and bolts of payment processing until they bump up against a situation where they can’t do what they want to do.

That was fine for a few millennia as people focused on exchanging coins and bills. Then, the internet came along and changed everything. Now, billions of consumers expect to pay where and when they want without cash — or much thought about how the companies they want to do business with are supposed to make it happen.

McKinsey’s 2024 Digital Payments Consumer Survey is one of many places on the internet where you’ll find empirical data on the prevalence of digital payments. The survey found that 92% of U.S. consumers used some form of digital payment system over the past year, which strikes us as consistent with what we see elsewhere.

Those were our thoughts as we prepared to speak with Sagit Manor, Chief Financial Officer at Nayax, one of the companies responsible for ushering in today’s increasingly cashless society.

At Nayax, merchants of all sizes in 120 countries find payment processing solutions with built-in loyalty and analytic capabilities that have them thanking their lucky stars that cash is in the past.

That’s required relentless innovation with abiding respect for customer needs at Nayax since its founding in Israel in 2005, Manor said. Now, Nayax has 11 offices around the world.

“Our mission has always been to simplify commerce and improve customer engagement,” Manor said. “And how do we do that? By enhancing operational efficiency and increasing customer satisfaction.”

It’s as simple as that and gets to the bottom-line core of the Nayax value proposition. Nayax’s combination of payment processing with loyalty solutions and management tools increases revenue and decreases costs. Merchants worldwide trust Nayax to stay ahead of industry trends while always offering an end-to-end solution.

“We do that for multiple verticals, including automated and self-service operations, retail and hospitality providers, and energy and mobility businesses,” Manor said. “We provide all our customers, from SMBs to enterprises, with a comprehensive toolset to drive customer engagement, retention, and revenue growth.”

Figures such as those in the McKinsey Digital Payments Consumer Survey are attainable because companies like Nayax make them possible. With financial behemoths like J.P. Morgan trumpeting that “payments are eating the world,” we have every reason to expect these trends will continue.

Nayax got its start in the automated self-service unattended space. Manor said it’s still the bread and butter of the business — at least for now, as Nayax forges new pathways in EV and retail.

“Unattended is basically a card-present transaction where there’s no one in front of you — think vending machines, car washes, and laundromats,” Manor said. “Our combination of payment processing with loyalty solutions lets you get your product or service out to your customer as quickly as possible while retaining that stickiness with the customer.”

CoinBridge is one way the company manages that stickiness for all its customers, not just those in the unattended space. CoinBridge converts loyalty points and rewards into spendable money customers can use everywhere.

It’s a potential game changer everywhere Nayax touches merchants. Think about how a car wash customer might regard a loyalty reward spendable at any store they choose a little differently than another point or hole-punch toward yet another free car wash. Through CoinBridge, the benefits of customer loyalty become broader.

“Today, you use your United Airlines points to purchase tickets and upgrades at United,” Manor said. “Imagine spending your United points at your local grocery store — because they have actual monetary value.”

After a spectacular financial performance in the third quarter of 2024, Nayax emerged with its core business of small-business unattended customers still responsible for 74% of its revenue. While those SMB performers generally operate no more than a dozen or so payment devices, a few Nayax unattended customers on the larger side manage tens or hundreds of thousands.

In a world where 45 million automated self-service unattended devices exist to take payments, Nayax has a hand in about 1.25 million. That speaks to the level of potential that remains in the unattended space.

“They’re waiting for Nayax to retrofit them from cash to cashless,” Manor said.

It’s reasonable to expect the non-unattended sides of the business to claim a larger share of the total. That’s because the loyalty challenge the company solves covers all kinds of customers, from small to large and outside the store to inside the store. Nayax’s Weezmo product provides an example of how that commitment to loyalty works in the retail context.

Weezmo is a powerful marketing solution that bridges the gap between online and offline sales. When you go online and see an advertisement for something you want to buy, Weezmo can bridge that gap and understand that you’re the same person when you go inside the store to purchase and attribute the purchase to the correct online campaign.

Weezmo enable retailers to increase engagement, conversions, and revenue by translating customer purchasing behavior to actionable insights and implementing them in personalized, data-driven campaigns to boost engagement with the customer.

“I like to call it the Google Analytics of in-store transactions,” Manor said.

But Weezmo isn’t the only avenue to those kinds of insights. Nayax performs similar feats in the unattended space, for example, simply in moving providers from cash-based to cashless payments.

One unattended customer, for example, with about 25,000 devices in the field, saw a 25% to 30% revenue increase and a 20% to 25% decrease in costs after converting to a Nayax environment.

But they also learned that their cash-based devices sometimes sat idle and out of order for days because the team had to wait for a customer to report a problem. That meant lost revenue, of course, with the added hit of customer frustration that could lead the customer to turn to another provider.

“Also, they had to manually adjust every single physical machine to, for example, offer a 25% discount that week or that day,” Manor said. “Today, through Nayax, they can make changes that affect all of their payment devices from Nayax’s portal within a few seconds.”

For Manor, that’s like going from darkness to light. Dynamic pricing is one of the advantages of this transition. For example, a customer might receive a 10th vending machine drink for free because the operator set it up through Nayax to work that way.

We think that’s a pretty cool trick. In the vending machine context, it’s easy to see how the promise of a little reward could turn a sporadic soft-drink customer into a regular one.

That stickiness is customer loyalty in action. Just increasing visibility into your customers can help you reduce costs through pricing capabilities and discounts. Moreover, the analytics behind the platform can assess whether your vending machine drink distribution is accurate for your customer base and let you know about any disparities before you refill your machines.

“Before Nayax, you didn’t know what you needed to restock before you got in the car,” Manor said. “Now, you know what’s missing from your machines before you leave.”

Now, extrapolate those seemingly modest gains across entire industry verticals. Nayax recently introduced an AI chatbot called Chatty for the amusement industry. Machine performance monitoring can provide operators with real-time insights and personalized recommendations based on player data.

Nayax’s transformation of the EV kiosk experience runs along similar lines. Non-Nayax charging areas need a payment machine for every charger. With Nayax EV kiosks, operators save money because now a kiosk can control as many as 10 chargers.

Innovation along the lines of what we just described comes through a concerted effort to respect the voice of the customer and translate feedback into actions. Particularly after the company’s performance in the third quarter of 2024, Manor said everyone at Nayax is excited to see the additional inroads of the future.

“Our brains can’t stop thinking about putting our customers first,” Manor said. “We’re always looking for new ways to improve our customers’ experiences and help merchants increase revenue, reduce costs, and reinforce customer loyalty loyalty and stickiness.”