New Vontier Research: Payment Friction Is Costing Convenience Retailers
New national research shows unified payment environments drive faster feature rollouts, smoother upgrades and stronger customer engagement across the forecourt
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Fragmentation is a hidden tax,
As the forecourt becomes a critical battleground for customer loyalty,
Unified Operators Are Pulling Ahead
The data is clear. Operators running more unified payment ecosystems are:
- More likely to describe upgrades as smooth and cost-effective (63% vs. 38%)
- More likely to execute on new payment and loyalty initiatives within six months of a decision being made (47% vs. 26%)
- Less likely to cite staff time for testing and configuration as a cost of certification and compliance (47% vs. 55%)
- More likely to say servicing and software updates are easy (43% vs. 10%)
Improving the customer experience was the most common motivation for investing in a unified payment architecture – cited by almost half (49%) of retailers – with improved system reliability and cost/time reduction in operations reported as the second and third most popular motivations.
The Opportunity Is Significant
Today, 56% of retailers rely on multiple payment processors and 68% operate two or more payment systems across devices. As a result, adding a new solution or update can require managing four to five separate vendor certifications (29% of respondents).
The result: 68% of fuel retailers take at least six months to deploy new payment or loyalty capabilities, and those with multiple providers wait even longer (73%). Nearly two-thirds (64%) reported they were very to extremely confident that consolidating vendors and technologies would meaningfully reduce certification cycles and related costs.
For operators running loyalty programs – one of the most powerful drivers of repeat visits and basket size – the cost of delay is especially high. Retailers with loyalty schemes are nearly three times more likely to report certification-related launch delays (32% vs. 12%).
"Convenience retail is built on delivering elevated consumer experiences and unified payment systems can support these expectations by driving faster feature rollouts, smoother upgrades and stronger customer engagement," said
- Launch new payment and loyalty features faster with fewer certification hurdles
- Reduce multi-vendor coordination and downtime risk
- Deliver the contactless, mobile-first and loyalty-integrated experiences consumers increasingly expect
- Free up internal teams and site staff from configuration and testing burdens
With 42% of retailers citing easier customer enrollment as a top loyalty driver for consolidation,
About
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260519876276/en/
Media Contact:
vontier@antennagroup.com
Investor Contact:
ryan.edelman@vontier.com
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