8 Best Value Added Services for Payment Acquirers to Resell in 2026

The top value added services in payment acquiring 2026 are the ones merchants use every trading day and acquirers can deliver across the payment terminals already in the field. Our eight are terminal-based loyalty, branded receipts and on-terminal feedback, white-label merchant dashboards, dispute management, merchant cash advances, dynamic currency conversion, pay by link and virtual terminals, and PCI DSS compliance programmes. Demand is already there: 70 percent of the small businesses McKinsey surveyed use at least one value-added service from their payments provider.

Key takeaways

• Merchants already buy VAS from their acquirer. In McKinsey's survey, 70 percent of small businesses used at least one value-added service from their payments provider.
• The payment terminal is now a software channel. The PCI SSC's PTS POI v7.0 added a requirement to allow third-party applications, and apps reach terminals through terminal management systems (TMS).
• Every service needs a billing unit and an owner. Agree the revenue share, licence or subscription terms, and who supports the merchant, before launch.
• Prove retention with cohorts, not assumptions. UK merchants do switch, and no public study shows that a set number of services stops them.

How we put this guide together

Zeal supplies three of the eight services (terminal-based loyalty, branded receipts and feedback, and the white-label merchant dashboard), so we have a commercial interest in this topic. The other five are service categories that many acquirers offer; where we give an example, we use the public pages of our live UK partners (Worldpay, Elavon, DNA Payments and Viva Wallet), checked on 10 October 2026, and we do not rank providers. We chose services that merchants use routinely, that can be delivered on or around existing payment terminals, and that have public documentation. The order is not a ranking.

The top value added services in payment acquiring 2026 at a glance

Table 1. The eight services at a glance, from Zeal's and our partners' public pages, checked 10 October 2026.

1. Terminal-based loyalty for card-present merchant retention

Software on the payment terminal recognises returning cardholders and rewards them at the moment of payment, with no app or plastic card. With Zeal, a customer joins in a couple of taps on the screen, and Loyalty Link lets an unregistered customer enter a phone number on the terminal, receive an SMS enrolment link and be recognised on later eligible visits. The payment application keeps control of the payment throughout. DNA Payments describes the service on its own site: "With our partner Zeal, we're making loyalty simple, accessible and rewarding for your business and your customers, by embedding loyalty programmes that run directly on your payment terminal."

Suits: acquirers and ISOs with hospitality and retail estates where customers return often.

Check before reselling: the exact terminal models (Table 3), who supports merchants day to day, and the lawful basis for customer data.

2. Branded receipts and on-terminal feedback

Every card payment produces a receipt. Zeal's branded receipts carry the provider's and the merchant's brand, the customer's loyalty balance and a next-visit offer. They run on the payment terminals merchants already use, rollout happens remotely across the estate, and they are live with Adyen, DNA Payments, Elavon, Lloyds Cardnet, Viva Wallet, Worldpay and NMI. Zeal's free Basic plan also lets merchants brand their terminal screens and collect customer feedback after every transaction.

Suits: acquirers that want a visible, low-cost service across the whole estate.

Check before reselling: fiscal and regulatory receipt fields must stay exactly as required, and reach grows only with transactions, as Zeal's own page points out.

3. White-label merchant dashboards

A white-label merchant dashboard is a mobile app that a payment provider gives its merchants under its own brand. Zeal's version shows live revenue, transactions and average spend, splits customers into new, returning, registered and unregistered, tracks loyalty membership and lets merchants run campaigns and update their terminal screens from the phone. Listed payment companies already charge for this kind of software: Shift4's annual report on Form 10-K says it generates subscription revenue from licensing software, business intelligence tools and payment device management.

Suits: acquirers whose merchants currently receive statements and reconciliation portals.

Check before reselling: data density, since a single-site merchant with light card volume will open it less often, and an onboarding plan; Zeal's page names both limits.

4. Dispute and chargeback management

Chargeback tools help merchants respond to disputes faster and with better evidence. As one example, Worldpay's dispute management range uses dispute information from card brands to deflect disputes before a chargeback claim is initiated, responds to chargebacks with AI-generated arguments for each case, and offers a self-service disputes portal and an API.

Suits: merchants with card-not-present sales, high-value goods or frequent disputes.

Check before reselling: who prepares evidence, who carries liability, how fees are charged, and how the service connects to your existing dispute operations.

5. Merchant cash advance

A merchant cash advance gives a business funding that it repays as a fixed percentage of its card sales. Worldpay's business cash advance, provided with Liberis, offers £1,000 to £300,000 with one fixed funding fee and no APR, is typically settled in four to 12 months, and is described as "an unsecured way of accessing finance and is not a loan". Because repayments come from card takings, the product sits naturally inside the acquiring relationship.

Suits: seasonal SMEs, and merchants funding stock or a refit.

Check before reselling: the funding partner, how the total cost is disclosed, personal guarantees, and what happens to repayments if a merchant moves provider.

6. Dynamic currency conversion

Dynamic currency conversion (DCC) lets an international cardholder choose, at the payment stage, between paying in local currency or in their own. Elavon UK says the customer sees the transaction amount in both currencies "along with the exchange rate and commission charge", that the business gets a rebate for each DCC transaction, and that over 80 currencies are handled for Visa, Mastercard and Diners Club cards.

Suits: hotels, attractions, airports and city-centre retail.

Check before reselling: rate transparency, staff training and complaint handling. For tourist retail, note that HMRC's VAT Notice 704/1 says the VAT Retail Export Scheme is no longer available in Great Britain.

7. Pay by link and virtual terminals: omnichannel payment solutions

Card-present merchants also take payments away from the counter, such as deposits, bookings and phone orders. Worldpay's Virtual Terminal takes mail-order and telephone-order payments in a browser and is included with Worldpay eCommerce at no additional cost, with free next-business-day settlement. Some acquirers also turn phones into acceptance devices: Viva.com says its Tap on Any Device solution is accessible on over 1,215 devices across 31 markets.

Suits: retailers and hospitality merchants taking deposits, bookings and phone orders.

Check before reselling: card-not-present fraud tools and each merchant's PCI DSS self-assessment type.

8. PCI DSS compliance programmes

Every merchant that stores, processes or transmits cardholder data falls within PCI DSS, and v4.0.1 has been the sole active version since v4.0 was retired on 31 December 2024. Compliance programmes turn that obligation into a supported service. Worldpay's SaferPayments, for example, pre-populates up to 90% of the self-assessment questionnaire for certain Worldpay products, schedules quarterly external vulnerability scans where applicable, and offers a Managed tier with phone-guided reporting.

Suits: SME estates where most merchants have no security team.

Check before reselling: never promise certification. The PCI SSC's FAQ 1301 says approved payment devices do not by themselves guarantee PCI DSS compliance or reduce the scope of a merchant's cardholder data environment.

Acquirer revenue share models: how VAS is paid for

VAS income behaves differently from processing income. Global Payments' FY2025 Form 10-K says it earns "software subscription and licensing fees, as well as other fees for specific value-added services, which may be unrelated to the number or value of transactions". Attach is the number to watch: Fiserv's Q2 2026 results presentation reports Clover "VAS penetration of 25% vs 24% a year ago". And the wider pool keeps growing: McKinsey's 2026 Global Payments Report says global payments revenue grew from $1.7 trillion in 2020 to $2.6 trillion in 2025, with growth projected to moderate to about 4 percent a year to 2030.

Table 2. Common VAS commercial models, with examples from public pages.

What the evidence says about merchant retention

UK merchants do move. In the PSR's card-acquiring market review, 16% of small and medium-sized merchants had switched in the previous two years and 29% had considered switching but did not. The PSR's 2022 remedies then added summary boxes, trigger messages that prompt businesses to shop around, and an 18-month cap on payment terminal lease and rental contracts for the 14 directed firms. Shift4's 10-K says its merchant agreements are "generally lasting three years on average" and that it retains customers "through high-value tools that enhance their operations and reduce the incentive to switch providers". None of this proves that a given number of services prevents churn, so measure retention with matched cohorts; our merchant churn cost framework shows one way to do it.

How terminal-resident VAS is deployed and governed

Payment terminals now run apps under the payment provider's control. The PCI SSC's PTS POI v7.0, published in May 2025, added a requirement to allow third-party applications such as app stores. Ingenico says payment providers can create their own app stores on AXIUM, and PAX reports that PAXSTORE connected to over 16 million payment terminals at the end of 2025, offering centralised terminal management, application distribution and remote key injection.

Deployment runs through the TMS. On Adyen's Android terminals, an app is uploaded to Adyen and then distributed on a schedule, by profile or by API request. J.P. Morgan's documentation describes a TMS agent that runs alongside its payment application on the terminal and handles operating system, application and configuration updates.

On the device, the payment application keeps control of payment. In Zeal's reference architecture, a separate VAS layer receives an approved, non-payment reference, and the recognition flow excludes the PIN, CVV, full card number, payment cryptograms and payment keys. Tokenisation still does not automatically remove PCI DSS scope (the PCI SSC's tokenisation guidelines keep every tokenisation component in scope), and the ICO's pseudonymisation guidance treats pseudonymised data as personal data for anyone holding the additional information. Our card-linked loyalty overview shows how recognition, enrolment and rewards fit together.

What we have learned deploying VAS through acquirers since 2019

I co-founded Zeal with Bellal Mohamed in 2019, and I have spent seven years building value-added services that reach merchants through their payment providers. We built the core technology in 2020 and 2021 and were recognised by Visa as an up-and-coming solution. We then tested Zeal in the real world for two years, 2022 and 2023, with Ingenico as a strategic partner, and merchant feedback from those pilots guided key improvements. Since 2024 we have added Castles and other industry partners.

In my experience, three practices matter most when an acquirer resells VAS:

• We confirm the terminal first. In my experience, each terminal family has its own operating system and deployment route, so we check the exact model before anything is switched on.
• We deploy through the partner's TMS. PSPs deploy the SDK to their own estates, so merchants never install anything.
• We agree data requirements up front. Integration and customer-data requirements are settled with each partner before deployment, and Zeal works alongside the existing EPOS and payment processing.

Table 3. Terminals Zeal supports today, from Zeal's guide to terminal-based loyalty. Availability depends on the payment provider.

The result so far: more than 30,000 merchants activated on Zeal across payment providers, seven live UK partners (Adyen, DNA Payments, Elavon, Lloyds Cardnet, NMI, Viva Wallet and Worldpay) and 4 million payment terminals in our partners' signed activation pipeline. We have raised $14 million in total, and the team won Team of the Year at the UK FinTech Awards 2026.

Frequently asked questions

Which value-added service should an acquirer add first?

Of the top value added services in payment acquiring 2026, start with the one that solves a clear merchant problem across most of your estate and that you can support. Terminal-based loyalty and branded receipts suit most card-present merchants on supported terminals, while DCC and cash advances suit narrower segments.

How do acquirer revenue share models for VAS work?

The provider and the acquirer agree a revenue pool, a billing unit (merchant, location, MID or terminal) and a split. Zeal's Premium plan, for example, is provided through the payment provider on a revenue share or an annual licence across nominated terminals.

Do value-added services improve card-present merchant retention?

They can give merchants reasons to stay, but no public study proves that a set number of services prevents churn. Compare matched cohorts of merchants with and without each service before you claim a retention effect.

What is the best payment provider service for a card-present estate?

There is no single best payment provider service. For card-present estates, services that run on the existing payment terminal, such as loyalty and branded receipts, avoid new hardware; check supported models first.

Sources

• McKinsey & Company, As ISVs disrupt payments, can merchant acquirers stay relevant?, 22 September 2022, and The 2026 Global Payments Report, 25 September 2026.
• Global Payments, Form 10-K for FY2025; Shift4 Payments, Form 10-K for FY2025; Fiserv, Q2 2026 results presentation, 6 August 2026.
• DNA Payments, Customer loyalty and rewards programme; Elavon UK, Dynamic currency conversion; Viva.com, In-person payments, checked 10 October 2026.
• Worldpay, Dispute management, Business cash advance, Virtual terminal and SaferPayments, checked 10 October 2026.
• Payment Systems Regulator, Card-acquiring market review: final report, November 2021, and PS22/2 remedies: final decision, 6 October 2022.
• HM Revenue and Customs, VAT Notice 704/1: tax-free shopping in the UK.
• PCI Security Standards Council, PCI DSS, PCI DSS v4.0.1, FAQ 1301, PTS POI v7.0 and tokenisation guidelines.
• Ingenico, AXIUM Android; PAX Technology, PAX 2025 annual results, 25 March 2026; Adyen, Android terminals; J.P. Morgan, In-store payments documentation.
• Information Commissioner's Office, Pseudonymisation.

About the author

Omar Ebeid is Co-founder and CEO of Zeal, which he founded with Bellal Mohamed in 2019. He holds an MSc in Entrepreneurship from the University of Bath and won the Vice-Chancellor's Award at the University of Surrey. Under his leadership Zeal won Team of the Year at the UK FinTech Awards 2026 and Platinum at the Juniper Research Future Digital Awards 2023, and has raised $14 million in total, including a $10 million pre-Series A round announced on 9 September 2026. Connect with Omar on LinkedIn.