ICC Loyalty currently serves more than 30 banks and over 11 million customers across ten or more countries. Its clients include Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank, Emirates Islamic, Dubai Islamic Bank and RAKBANK. The platform enables financial institutions to run personalised rewards programmes, targeted campaigns and lifecycle engagement tools intended to drive customer retention and increase transaction frequency.

Raman Khanduja, co-founder and chief executive of Mintoak, framed the acquisition as a strategic pivot rather than a bolt-on. “Payments have become the foundation of banking relationships. The next phase of growth will come from engagement. By bringing together merchant engagement, customer loyalty and data-driven intelligence, we are building a payments and engagement OS that enables banks to create greater value for merchants, consumers and banks,” he said.

Amit Narang, co-founder and chief executive of ICC Loyalty, said the combination would allow his company to incorporate Mintoak’s AI and platform capabilities to deliver what he described as hyper-personalisation for existing and new clients.

Following the acquisition, Mintoak says it now partners with more than 50 banks across 20 or more countries. Its existing relationships include HDFC Bank, Axis Bank and SBI Payments in India, and Absa Bank in Africa. The platform processes more than $93 billion in annual payment volume across a merchant base of over 5 million. Investors include PayPal Ventures, British International Investment, HDFC Bank, Pravega Ventures and Z3Partners.

The acquisition reflects a broader structural shift in the payments industry. As the underlying rails for card acceptance and transaction processing become more commoditised, the margin opportunity for acquirers and payment platforms has narrowed. The competitive response from a growing number of players is to move up the value chain into data analytics, loyalty and engagement, capturing more of the revenue that flows from the bank-merchant-consumer triangle.

Several acquiring platforms and banking-as-a-service providers in Asia and the Middle East are pursuing similar strategies, bundling loyalty, offers and data monetisation into what were formerly pure-processing contracts. The risk in this model is execution complexity: combining a B2B payments infrastructure business with a consumer engagement layer requires different product disciplines, different regulatory considerations and, in markets such as the UAE, adherence to data localisation and consumer protection rules that vary by jurisdiction.

For Mintoak, the near-term markers to watch are whether the two platforms can be integrated into a genuinely unified product, how quickly the combined entity can cross-sell ICC Loyalty’s capabilities to Mintoak’s existing bank partners in India and Africa, and whether the profitability margin holds as the business scales geographically. The backing of British International Investment, the UK development finance institution, also signals an expectation of meaningful expansion into frontier and emerging markets beyond the current footprint.