How Stored Value Wallets Drive Deeper Loyalty and Connection Between Merchants and Customers

In a Nutshell: Many enterprise retailers like Starbucks have the muscle to build promotions and incentives into their payment apps from scratch. That leaves others, including midmarket chain competitors, in the lurch because they lack the resources to out-innovate and outcompete. Ansa steps in to help coffee shops, quick-serve restaurants, and a growing collection of businesses in other verticals go up against their established competitors. With Ansa Anywhere, Ansa brings mobile wallets and contactless payments to its customers, leveling the payment playing field still further.

We find the payments industry endlessly fascinating. But we realize it isn’t the greatest subject to bring up at parties.

So we were excited to connect with Sophia Goldberg, Co-Founder and CEO of the stored-value platform provider Ansa, because she describes herself as an absolute nerd for payments.

More than that, she’s practically made it her career mission to understand payments as integral to the physical mechanisms of the global economy. What’s not to like?

Goldberg’s journey started at the Dutch payment provider Adyen, where she spent half a decade in commercial and product roles. She quickly saw how hard it was for merchants to understand and acquire payment systems that made sense for their customers and their businesses.

Being the person she is, apparently, she ended up writing a book about what she learned, publishing the “Field Guide to Global Payments” in 2022. She told us it’s the Payments 101 course she wished she’d had.

She learned that innovation in commerce has outpaced innovation in payments. From use cases like marketplaces and microtransactions to how convenience stores and quick-serve brands pay, there’s a gap between capabilities and what the market demands.

That’s where Ansa comes in. Goldberg and her co-founder, JT Cho, homed in on the value of closed-loop or stored-value wallet platforms like the famous one Starbucks introduced years ago. The promise of ever-greater rewards incents customers to come back more frequently to spend the cash they store in their Starbucks wallet, which connects to their bank account for easy top-offs.

Retailers on the enterprise level may have huge dev teams to build and innovate these systems as marketing and promotions vehicles. Ansa steps in with agile stored-value wallet solutions to help competitors catch up to and surpass them.

“We started pulling at threads and realized there was something there in terms of a gap in the market and the need for a modern technical solution,” Goldberg said. “Fast forward a little over two years, and that’s what we’ve built and brought to market.”

Payments is a dynamic industry, to use a cliché. In fact, it’s one of the most intricate components of the financial services industry we’ve seen. And that’s saying a lot.

Merchants on the hunt for an edge can circumvent those complexities through Ansa stored-value wallets. They serve as communications tools to reward their most loyal patrons. Customer interactions through apps yield important behavioral insights from thoughtfully applied data analytics.

The potential stretches to many verticals from the medium to large coffee and quick-service chains that have been Ansa’s first customers. Goldberg sees immediate applications in metro transit, mobile gaming, creator platforms, and the fuel and convenience store industry.

It works because saving on fees is just the tip of the iceberg. For the reasons we outlined above, Ansa brings digital financial and loyalty retention benefits to more market segments, driving retention revenue and cash flow.

“Stored-value wallets can have a massive impact on their bottom line and customer experience, but knowing how to build one is not a competitive advantage,” Goldberg said. “We’re payments people, so the brands we work with don’t have to be.”

The specifics depend on the customer. Ansa’s Incentive Engine moves beyond current enterprise wallet solutions to drive usage and engagement in many innovative ways.

Merchants can now reward customers with additional bonuses as a thank you for topping off an account. For added convenience, wallets can accept refunds directly rather than route them back out to your card, regardless of whether you used the wallet to pay.

Depending on the situation, rewards can function as part of a customer service appeasement strategy or a much larger marketing push.

“We’re a mix of meeting the needs of today and creating a solution for tomorrow,” Goldberg said. “What we’re most excited for are the experiences our customers can launch that we haven’t even thought we’re solving for.”

Ansa white-label solutions typically live within a brand’s order head app or web environment, but the footprint depends on the customer. Ansa prides itself on offering APIs for complete customer control of the frontend experience and SDKs with frontend components.

They’re aiming to address those habitual-use, low-value transactions that all Ansa customers have in common. It’s what Starbucks realized back in the day. You gain cash flow through the improved unit economics of reducing the cost of payments.

“These are your $2, $5, $10, and even $20 transactions that you’re doing multiple times a week or month — I liken them to all the things you would have used the cash in your pocket for 20 years ago,” Goldberg said. “These are brands that customers clearly have an affinity to. We bring something that works better for them in a digital way.”

Why now, you may ask. Goldberg bets it may have something to do with consumers’ changed relationship with the marketplace.

People are tightening their belts as the economy continues to shift. Meanwhile, marketing and loyalty have grown so much that most brands of any scale have data teams to help understand their customers. They can do targeted marketing on TikTok, make affiliate deals, and have third-party distribution.

Therefore, it’s a battle out there to stay top of mind. In that environment, closed-loop payments become a great way to drive deeper loyalty and connection — as unit economics improve.

Introductory conversations with Ansa typically focus on a long-term vision of where the brand could be in terms of size, scale, and customer frequency. The Starbucks model is prominent, but so are brands like Sephora, illustrating Ansa’s potential reach. Results come incrementally as adoption and traction change customer behavior.

“It’s music to our ears when a brand comes to us and says they’d love to have their best customers come one more time a month,” Goldberg said. “That’s where we can help.”

Ultimately, you’re not just gaining cash flow. You’re building a relationship. It’s all about how you interact with your customers at the point of purchase. Increasingly, that point is a phone screen.

Online payments have grown more accessible and user-friendly from the brand perspective. But in-store payments are still often complex, with lots of systems and integrations. If you’re a large or franchise brand, you’re frequently linking different stacks in different locations.

Ansa Anywhere fixes all of that by rising above it. It’s a tap-to-pay solution that offers a significant stride forward in leveling the playing field between offline and online payments.

The tool is a branded virtual card that lives in Apple Pay and Google Pay. It relegates payment platforms and point-of-sale tools to their rightful place in the background of the transaction.

“More than half of American consumers have now used tap to pay to make a payment, which is amazing considering that number was in single digits before the pandemic,” Goldberg said. “We knew when we built our in-store capability, it had to meet consumers where they are.”

It’s everything the merchant-buyer needs, Goldberg said. There’s no need for QR code scanners. You don’t need to train your baristas to ask about the payment method when all the customer really wants to do is walk away with a beverage and snack.

“We’re super excited for that feature,” Goldberg said. “We created some new categories and worked for months with Apple, Google, and other partners to define this new thing we’re trying to do.”

It means more data for the Ansa platform to port into customer data repositories and applications and more opportunities to glean direct insights from patterns revealed in the apps.

Data helps merchants better understand how individual customers shop and allows them to test which incentives work for which customers. There’s also a financial planning and analysis benefit from this more profound understanding of customer behavior.

As Ansa grows, it plans to bring its customers along with it, relying on their feedback and referrals. It’s full speed ahead as the team builds on success.

“If it’s something that makes one of our wallet programs successful, and each brand would have to build it themselves, it’s something we should build for our customers,” Goldberg said.