The next chapter for Adyen & Talon.One: Closing the customer identity gap

Since then, we’ve been aligning teams across the globe, mapping where our platforms meet, and speaking with customers at the forefront of loyalty innovation. We’ve been intentional about putting the customer experience first and defining how this category should evolve.

This month, we’re beginning to take that thinking to the market. You’ll see the Talon.One brand evolve to sit alongside Adyen’s, while our teams bring this vision into conversations with customers and prospects. I want to use this moment to talk about the problem at the heart of that shift: the anonymous shopper.

Most businesses know only a small share of their customers well enough to serve them personally. Customer identity remains scattered across transactions, website visits, app sessions, and reward redemptions, leaving businesses with a partial picture they struggle to act on.

For forward-looking businesses, closing this gap represents a significant opportunity. By bringing consented first-party and payments data into the customer engagement stack, businesses gain a richer understanding of the customer and enable more relevant personalization, more intelligent incentives, and experiences that build a lasting relationship without defaulting to broad, margin-eroding discounts.

The industry has spent years trying to close this gap. But recognition still too often requires the customer to open an app, scan a card, enter a number, or find a code. The gap is especially visible in stores, where Adyen’s Retail Index shows 80% of shoppers remain anonymous. But this is a broader identity problem: businesses can’t consistently recognize and serve the same customer across every channel.

When we founded Talon.One, we had a contrarian belief: loyalty and promotions should be core business infrastructure. While much of the market focused on basic earn-and-burn programs, we built a headless, API-first platform that allowed enterprises to create their own incentive logic and execute it in any channel, in real time.

But through years of working with enterprise customers, we came to understand that flexible incentive logic was only part of the answer. Even the most sophisticated experience depends on knowing who the customer is - and identification remains fragmented and too dependent on customer effort.

That challenge has become more important with the rise of AI and agentic commerce. AI can make engagement more intelligent and personal, but only when it has high-quality, consented data and a reliable way to act on it.

The architecture we chose a decade ago matters more now than ever. Headless, API-first infrastructure makes loyalty and promotions accessible across channels, systems, and emerging interfaces.

Customers do not identify simply because a business wants more data. They do it when there is a meaningful value exchange.

Loyalty gives customers a reason to identify, engage, and share data with consent. But when recognition requires an extra task, that value exchange breaks down.

Payments can change that equation. The payment method is something the customer already brings to every transaction, creating the potential for automatic recognition through an action they were already going to take.

By bringing payments data into the engagement stack, businesses can build richer customer profiles and make loyalty, promotion, and pricing decisions based on a more complete view of behavior. They can also better understand which incentives influenced which transactions - and use those insights to improve engagement and conversion.

The connection also creates a more data-driven feedback loop. Instead of relying on assumptions about whether an offer worked, businesses can better understand which incentives influenced which transactions - and use those insights to continually improve engagement, and conversion.

Loyalty provides the reason to identify. Payments can make recognition more effortless and enrich the data available to the business. Talon.One turns those insights into personalized incentives and engagement that can influence what the customer does next.

Our early conversations with Adyen focused on connecting two complementary platforms. Talon.One could bring real-time loyalty and promotion decisioning; Adyen could bring the payment infrastructure sitting at the critical point of transactions across channels.

As those discussions progressed, it became clear that the opportunity was bigger than an integration between two products.

Together, Adyen and Talon.One can connect payments data, customer identity, loyalty, and decisioning more deeply. The potential is a fundamentally stronger engagement model: more customers can be recognized and enrolled, customer profiles can become richer over time, and businesses can use those insights to create more personal, data-driven incentives and smarter pricing decisions.

This brings loyalty deeper into the enterprise technology stack - closer to customer identity, commerce, and payments - rather than leaving it as a marketing front end or a program operating in isolation.

You’ll soon start to see how we’re bringing this opportunity to life. Get an exclusive first look, launching live November 4 at INCENTIVIZE Summit in London - save your spot here.

Until then, if there is one idea worth sitting with, it is this: the next era of loyalty begins when the anonymous customer becomes known, through a value exchange that makes recognition worthwhile and effortless.