The world of payments is witnessing the rapid adoption of mobile wallet payments, with over 60% of the world’s population expected to use digital wallets by 2026. Take a look at your own day-to-day and think about how you pay as a consumer. You grab a coffee, split a dinner bill, or pay for something in-store on the fly, and it’s just phone out, tap, done. Apple Pay and Google Pay have made paying feel almost invisible.
However, even as consumers increasingly pay using mobile wallets for a variety of purchases, key in-store retail journeys still haven’t caught up. Loyalty, gifting, and BNPL, for instance, still largely sit outside the contactless payment flow. So, when a customer reaches the till, they’re pushed into extra steps: pulling out a separate loyalty card, searching for a gift code, showing ID, or waiting while staff follow manual processes they’ve had to be trained on.
A clear opportunity at the till
It’s not a surprise that many retail brands feel stuck with existing loyalty, gifting, BNPL, and in-store financing. Wallet-first behaviour has surged, with digital wallet use growing tenfold between 2014 and 2024 and reaching around $3.6tn online and $12tn in-store. Yet on the ground, three gaps keep showing up:
- Loyalty still leans on outdated mechanics: Customers earn points digitally, but in-store redemption often requires a separate physical card, a barcode hunt, or an ID check that clashes with tap-to-pay. No wonder 51% fail to redeem loyalty points because they find redemption too inconvenient.
- Gifting is still mostly stuck in plastic and fiddly voucher codes: Physical or code-based gift cards add friction for customers and in-store staff. They’re easy to forget, awkward to redeem against real baskets, and often force manual split-tender at the till.
- BNPL stops at the shop door: Online BNPL lifts conversion, but that same wallet-smooth pay-later journey rarely carries into the store, where redemption runs into complex PoS setups, staff-led handling, or extra checkout steps. <1% of physical checkouts support BNPL today, even as the market is projected to grow by 17.45% to $1.43tn by 2030.
These gaps translate to lost sales, weaker engagement, and stalled customer journeys. Bridging this gap for businesses is crucial and calls for a payments infrastructure that can bring them up to the speed and convenience of that familiar contactless payment consumer experience.
Time to transition to the consumer platform of choice
Loyalty, gifting and BPNL need to be reimagined for the ubiquity of mobile wallets, ready for use online – and crucially for this topic – in-store.
The move to Apple and Google Pay wallets unlocks a wide range of practical use cases:
- Loyalty: These apps can issue their customers wallet-ready virtual cards, where earned points or store credit accumulate automatically. Rewards build directly on the card, and redemption is just another tap at checkout. No extra steps, no staff training, no PoS rework.
- Gifting: Gifting platforms can replace physical gift cards with wallet-ready virtual cards. Recipients add them to Apple Pay or Google Pay, tap to spend in store, and top up or split-pay seamlessly if the basket exceeds the gift value.
- In-store BNPL: Perhaps one of the most exciting areas, given the market size, such providers can turn an online BNPL approval into a one-time, merchant-restricted virtual card that can be provisioned into the customer’s wallet, ready to redeem in-store through a standard contactless payment checkout, with no PoS changes or staff training required.
How Weavr rolls out Apple Pay and Google Pay for embedders
Unfortunately, while most would agree with the vision of mobile-ready in-store customer engagement, it is easier imagined than implemented. Getting Apple Pay and Google Pay provisioning live involves BIN certification by country and currency, Apple-mandated push provisioning through a certified app flow, and meeting Apple and Google security and UX standards.
All of that feeds into a rigorous approval and testing path before launch. For most retailers, doing this in-house becomes a long, specialist, multi-market effort just to get live and stay compliant. As a result, for many retailers, it is prohibitively expensive given the complexity involved and the sheer number of vendors needed to assemble and maintain a solution that, in effect, has to meet banking standards.
And that’s precisely where Weavr comes in. Beyond wallet-ready card issuance, Weavr makes launching the feature effortless by:
- Mobile enablement: Removing the complexity of mobile-wallet enablement, including per-country and per-currency BIN certification requirements.
- Push provisioning: Supporting Apple-mandated “push provisioning” through a certified mobile flow, so virtual cards can be added to wallets securely.
- SDK integration: Providing an SDK and guided integration flow to embed push provisioning inside the embedder’s own platform UX, enabling a one-tap, fully brand-owned “Add to Wallet” journey.
- Apple compliance: Managing Apple’s compliance, testing and approval journey for embedders through a white-glove certification service, reducing risk and accelerating time-to-market.
- Spend controls: Enabling embedders to let their business customers restrict cards to approved merchants or categories, giving them end-to-end control over spending.
The retail-redefining scenarios we have outlined are already a reality. Weavr presently powers a number of innovative BNPL, gifting and retail-engagement solution providers in the UK and in key European markets, and of course, the retailers they serve.
Ready to bring your retail engagement solutions up to the standard that most customers now expect? Enable Apple Pay and Google Pay wallet provisioning for your loyalty, gifting and in-store BNPL flows, and turn digital value into real in-store spend. Get in touch with one of our experts and schedule a meeting now.
