The points era is quietly closing
Traditional transactional loyalty — earn points, redeem points, switch brands when a competitor offers 2% more back — has a structural ceiling. Members are price-sensitive, emotionally detached, and notoriously quick to bolt. What's replacing it, according to the report, is an experiential and emotional architecture built on access-based rewards, community membership mechanics, and personalized milestone recognition that turns routine purchases into genuine brand affinity.
Global Market Insights points to mature deployments already in market — Marriott Bonvoy's experience auctions, Sephora's Beauty Insider community with tiered event access, and American Airlines' AAdvantage lifestyle rewards — as evidence that members respond more enthusiastically to experiences than to equivalent monetary value delivered through points. That distinction matters enormously for anyone designing a loyalty mechanic from scratch.
AI and mobile are doing the heavy lifting underneath
Two infrastructure shifts are making the new loyalty stack possible. The first is real-time data: cloud-native event streaming, vector databases, and edge-deployed recommendation models have collapsed the gap between a behavioral signal and a loyalty response from days to milliseconds. Platforms like Salesforce Loyalty Management, Adobe Experience Cloud, and Oracle CX Loyalty are embedding predictive AI that flags churn risk and intervenes with a personalized re-engagement offer before a member even thinks about leaving.
The second is mobile as the primary engagement surface, not a companion to email. GSMA Intelligence data cited in the report shows 4.7 billion people — 58% of the global population — were using mobile internet in 2024, projected to reach 5.5 billion by 2030. Mobile apps already account for $4.55 billion of the loyalty market by engagement channel in 2025, roughly 37% of the total. Push notifications, biometric login, and in-app gamification are no longer nice-to-haves; they're the table stakes.
The top five vendors — Oracle, Microsoft, SAP, Adobe, and Salesforce — collectively held 14.3% of the market in 2025, with Oracle leading at over 3.8%. The rest is a long tail of regional and specialized platforms, which is precisely where most of the interesting tokenized loyalty experiments still live.
What this means for our work
If you're a brand team reading this with a token-gated membership on your roadmap, a few things are worth sitting with. The browser cookie deprecation the report highlights is pushing enterprises toward zero-party and first-party data — exactly the inputs that on-chain loyalty wallets and verifiable credentials can collect cleanly, with explicit consent and portable ownership.
The "community membership mechanic" the report names as a core differentiator maps almost one-to-one onto what tokenized access, NFT memberships, and next-gen ticketing already deliver: scarce, verifiable benefits a member can carry across brand ecosystems. And the shift from mass rewards to individually predicted interventions opens a natural door for AI agents that act on a member's behalf, surfacing the right perk at the right moment on the right channel.
What to watch over the next few quarters: whether the dominant enterprise platforms absorb tokenized identity and credentialing into their stacks faster than specialized vendors push interoperability standards. Either way, the budget is there — $39.1 billion's worth of it by 2035 — and members are signaling loud and clear that they want to feel recognized, not just rewarded.