Know which merchants are leaving before they tell you
Zeal monitors transaction and terminal signals across your estate and scores every merchant's churn risk in real time: volume trends, transaction recency, payment acceptance health and terminal activity. Your team sees Critical risks with the main driver named, and calls before the merchant cancels.
The World's #1 VAS Solution on Payment Terminals
See churn risk before it becomes churn
Zeal watches volume trends, transaction recency, payment acceptance health and terminal activity across your estate, and scores every merchant's churn risk continuously. You stop discovering churn in a month-end report and start seeing it while it is still preventable.
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Every alert names its driver
Risk surfaces as a daily-refreshed level (Healthy, Watchlist, At Risk or Critical) with a named main driver, so your account team knows why a merchant is flagged, not just that they are. Calls start with the right question instead of a guess.
Call before the cancellation call
A merchant's volume halves and their terminal goes quiet for days. Your team sees Critical with the driver named, and picks up the phone while there is still a relationship to save, not after the cancellation email arrives.
Retention compounds at the terminal
Prediction tells you who is leaving; the terminal gives them a reason to stay. Merchants who run loyalty and analytics on your card machines build their customer database there, and leaving you would mean walking away from it.
Built consent-first
Zeal works like a cookie for the card machine: it runs quietly in the background of the terminal and turns every transaction into intelligence for you and your merchants. Unlike web cookies, it is built consent-first: data is tokenised, no card numbers are stored, and everything is PCI DSS and UK GDPR compliant.
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Why merchants really leave, and what prediction changes
Payment providers reduce merchant churn by reading the warning signs already present in terminal and transaction data, then acting weeks before a merchant gives notice. Zeal watches four signal families on every terminal it runs on (volume trends, transaction recency, payment acceptance health and terminal activity) and turns them into a churn-risk level for each merchant, refreshed daily. When a merchant moves into the Critical band, the account team sees the named driver behind the change and can make the right call while there is still time to change the outcome.
What does merchant churn actually cost a payment provider?
Every merchant who leaves takes three things with them: the residuals on every future transaction, the acquisition cost already spent to win them, and the reference that would have won their neighbours. Annual attrition in small-business acquiring is commonly reported at around 20%, which means a mid-sized ISO can lose a fifth of its book before its account managers have made a single proactive call. The economics are unforgiving because replacement costs more than retention: a new merchant means signing bonuses, hardware subsidies and onboarding spend set against margins that keep compressing. Keeping the merchants you already have is the cheapest growth available to any provider.
How does Zeal score churn risk?
Zeal runs on the payment terminal itself, so it reads the merchant's trading rhythm directly rather than through month-end reports. The assessment draws on four signal families: volume trends, transaction recency, payment acceptance health and terminal activity. Every merchant carries a risk level (Healthy, Watchlist, At Risk or Critical), refreshed daily with the main driver shown beside it, so a slow fade and a sudden stop look different, and both surface before the merchant calls to cancel. There is nothing new to install beyond the software already on the terminal: payment processes exactly as it does today, with no recertification, no second authorisation and no added scheme fees.
What does a Critical alert look like?
When a merchant crosses into the Critical band, the alert names the driver: declining transaction volume, lengthening gaps between trading days, deteriorating payment acceptance, or a terminal that has gone quiet. That single detail changes the conversation. Instead of a vague check-in, the account manager opens with the specific thing that changed, which is often the moment a merchant admits they have been rate-shopped or that something in the business has shifted. Each alert arrives ranked by severity and paired with a suggested action and the merchant's contact details, so a small team spends its time on the accounts most likely to be saved.
Why do merchants rarely warn you before they leave?
Because leaving is easy and complaining is not. A merchant offered a better headline rate signs with the competitor first and tells you afterwards, often by letting the terminal go quiet. By the time the cancellation notice arrives, the decision was made weeks earlier. The terminal is the earliest sensor a provider has: takings soften, acceptance patterns change, trading days thin out. None of that appears in a month-end settlement report until the merchant is already gone. Watching the estate live turns those silent weeks into the window where retention actually happens.
What can an account team do once they know?
Ranked risk turns retention from a calendar exercise into a triage list. Account teams work down the list: a call opened with the named driver, a tailored offer, or switching on a merchant-facing service such as loyalty and customer insight (the kind of benefit a rival's rate card cannot match), with every call and email logged against the merchant. A merchant whose repeat trade measurably improves has a concrete reason to stay that has nothing to do with price.
What is merchant churn prediction?
Merchant churn prediction is the use of payment and terminal data to estimate how likely each merchant is to leave a payment provider, early enough to intervene. It differs from churn reporting, which counts merchants after they have gone. A prediction system watches leading indicators (trading volume, transaction recency, acceptance health and terminal activity) and expresses them as a risk level account teams can sort and act on. Zeal builds this into the terminal software a provider already deploys: websites have cookies; card machines have Zeal, working with the customer's consent at the point of payment.
Where churn prediction is not the right fit
Prediction needs history. A merchant live for only a few weeks has not yet established the trading rhythm the score reads, so new estates see value build over the first months rather than on day one. Some departures are invisible to any data: a retirement, a sale of the business, a relocation. And a score does not retain anyone by itself: providers who see results pair the alerts with a clear playbook for who calls, when, and with what offer. Zeal shortens the time between a merchant deciding to look elsewhere and the provider knowing about it; the conversation that follows is still yours to have.
Questions providers ask about reducing merchant churn
How early can churn risk show up in payment data?
Weeks before formal notice in most cases. Behavioural change (softer volumes, longer gaps between trading days, declining acceptance) tends to precede the cancellation letter, because merchants decide to leave before they tell their provider.
Does monitoring churn risk require new hardware or recertification?
No. Zeal is software installed on the terminals a provider already deploys. Payment processes exactly as it does today: no recertification, no second authorisation and no added scheme fees.
Which signals feed the churn-risk score?
Four signal families: volume trends, transaction recency, payment acceptance health and terminal activity. They combine into a risk level per merchant (Healthy, Watchlist, At Risk or Critical), refreshed daily, with Critical alerts that name the driver behind a change.
Which payment providers can use this today?
Zeal is live with Elavon, Worldpay, NMI as a gateway, and Lloyds Cardnet, and works with acquirers, ISOs and payfacs as a value-added service on their existing terminal estates.
What should a provider do when an alert fires?
Work the list in severity order. The alert names what changed and pairs it with a suggested action and the merchant's contact details, so the account manager can open with it (a retention offer, a service conversation, or activating merchant-facing features such as loyalty) and log the outcome against the merchant.
See your own estate scored. Talking to Zeal takes two steps: tell us which kind of provider you are, then book straight into the right person's calendar.
Talk to salesActivating Zeal on your card machines is a breeze
Choose your integration path
Connect host-to-host through our APIs or embed the on-terminal SDK. You get a sandbox, an integration guide and a reference implementation from day one.
Share your estate details
Send your merchant data file with TIDs, MIDs and terminal models. We prepare signed builds for each terminal type, with release notes and a rollback plan.
Pilot, then roll out
We prove the experience on a pilot cohort with hands-on support, then deploy remotely across your estate through your TMS. No hardware changes, no engineer visits.
Go live and activate
Your merchants get onboarding flows, training material and ready-made campaign templates for their first 90 days, and you track activation and usage by cohort.
This is how we’re revolutionising payments for our partners
See what Zeal delivers in the field. Our partners earn new revenue from their terminal estates, and their merchants get customer identification, loyalty and insight at the point of payment.
Merchants run Zeal on the card machines they already own.
More repeat visits for restaurants running loyalty on Zeal.
Customer profiles created for merchants using Zeal.
Don’t take our word for it
Manos Perdikaris
Business Unit Manager
Jean-Philippe Niedergang
CCO and CEO of EMEA Region
Boris Ferlet
SVP, Android & Partner Ecosystem
Ahmed Hanafi
Founder & CEO
Mostafa Al Sagheer
CEO
Zeal has flexible pricing to fit your business needs
Every agreement is shaped with your commercial team: revenue share on a joint go-to-market, or an annual licence across your MIDs.
Revenue share or annual licence
One integration, two commercial models. Partner on revenue share, where Zeal goes to market inside your merchant proposition and we share the value-added services revenue it creates. Or license annually, a fixed yearly fee that activates Zeal across the MIDs you nominate, with predictable costs from day one.
Enable your card machines to:
Identify customers and offer exclusive rewards
Offer zero-friction card-linked loyalty
Showcase merchant branding and collect feedback
Provide merchants with powerful analytics
Provide you with powerful customer behaviour insights
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Frequently asked questions
Zeal transforms your card machines into intelligent customer engagement tools, enabling real-time customer insights, visibility over in-store customers, and frictionless loyalty programmes for your merchants.
By integrating Zeal, you open new revenue streams through value-added services, differentiate your offering in a competitive market, and significantly boost merchant retention.
Zeal enables your card machines to identify customers through their payment cards, recognising employees, airline passengers, or telecom customers at the point of sale. This allows you to offer tailored rewards linked to existing corporate benefits or loyalty programmes. With Zeal, you can strengthen strategic partnerships and drive higher transaction volumes for your merchants.
Yes. Zeal is fully compliant with PCI DSS, GDPR, and follows industry best practices for data protection and security. Our technology is designed with privacy and compliance at its core.
Zeal is also recognised by industry leaders such as Visa and Ingenico, and has trusted partners worldwide, reinforcing our commitment to innovation, reliability, and global scalability.
Choose your integration path (host-to-host API or on-terminal SDK), share your merchant data file with TIDs, MIDs and terminal models, and we handle the rest: signed builds, a supported pilot, then remote deployment across your estate through your TMS.
Zeal is card machine-agnostic and works with all devices, both Android models and older Linux-based ones. We support all manufacturers including Ingenico, PAX, Castles, Verifone, Aisino and others, allowing you to activate Zeal across all your existing hardware with ease.
Yes. Zeal is built for global scalability and there are active card machines with Zeal in multiple markets globally. With multilingual support, regional compliance, and flexible integration options, Zeal can be activated anywhere, enabling consistent value-added services for your merchants worldwide.