Economic systems need to align with planetary boundaries — and the financial infrastructure we already have is one of the most underused levers for getting there.
Sustainable choices don't fail because consumers don't care — research consistently shows they do. They fail at the activation layer. Repair services go unused. Take-back schemes sit empty. Lower-carbon options get overlooked at the moment of purchase. Whether it's repair, resale, refill, or simply choosing the more sustainable product, the systems designed to nudge that behaviour aren't doing their job.
Loyalty programmes are the obvious lever — they exist precisely to reinforce habits and reward choices. Yet most are designed to keep a customer close to a single brand, accumulating points that can only be spent in one place. That serves retention. It does not serve behaviour change at scale.
the activation gap
The opportunity isn't whether circular loyalty can be built — it's who in the payments and financial ecosystem is best positioned to build it, using infrastructure, data, and the transaction moment that already exist. So far, none of them have moved decisively.
Four actors in the payments and financial ecosystem, each with a different advantage — and a different set of challenges.
Closest to the consumer at the moment that matters — the checkout. The infrastructure to embed circular incentives at the point of transaction already exists. The action so far has been minimal.
Proximity not to the transaction, but to the consumer's whole financial life. Uniquely placed to frame circular spending as financially intelligent — repair as saving, conscious consumption as wealth.
Ecosystem-wide data and the rails everyone builds on. In theory, best placed to set a universal circular loyalty standard. In practice, furthest from the direct consumer relationship.
Trade-in providers, DPP platforms, sustainability-embedded fintech. Built for this — agile and motivated, but dependent on the bigger players' infrastructure to reach real scale.
Will brands ever loosen their grip on loyalty data, so sustainable actions can be rewarded across the ecosystem — not locked inside a single brand?
Will Digital Product Passports and regulation enable fairer reward distribution between brands and the other actors across the value chain?
How are conscious, sustainable consumer needs evolving in the age of AI?
More than a decade in payments — at PayPal, and as Head of Payments in European e-commerce before it — taught me how much weight sits in a single moment. The point of payment is a decision, a conversation, a question of trust. Optimising that moment, online and at the checkout, was much of my work — and it's where some of our most human behaviours play out.
When I co-founded Menddie, a care and repair platform, I met those same behaviours from the other side: trying to get people to actually adopt circular services, not just say they valued them. The distance between intention and action was the whole problem. Later, working on Digital Product Passports with global retailers, I saw how much further the relationship could run — how the data attached to a product could keep it alive long after the sale.
All of it points the same way. The values people spend by are shifting, and the frustration with brands and providers slow to respond is real. Payments and banks sit closer to that shift than almost anyone — and have barely begun to use it. That gap is where I work.
I work with payment companies and banks to turn what they already have — customer data, the checkout, a trusted relationship — into a lever that closes the gap between sustainable intention and action. I also advise retailers and Digital Product Passport players rethinking loyalty and engagement.
Keynotes, panels, and expert-network sessions on the role payments and banking can play in driving more conscious consumer behaviour — for industry events, expert networks, and leadership teams.
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