Australia just capped interchange fees and banned card surcharges. On the surface, that feels like a win for consumers… But underneath that headline is something most loyalty executives haven’t fully sat with yet: the quiet subsidy that made “earn on everything” economically viable? It’s going away.
And that changes the math on nearly everything.
Rewards get harder to fund at scale. Those passive earn models (the ones just sitting there accumulating points every time a customer swipes) they lose their economic justification. And suddenly, every loyalty program in Australia has to answer a question it’s been dodging for a long time: what are we actually driving? The program must deliver performance to survive.
The programs that treated interchange like a revenue stream are going to scramble. But the ones that were already built around real behavioral change (the ones that can point to incrementality, not just participation) are going to find themselves in a surprisingly strong position. Because here’s the thing… the question was never really “how many points did we issue?” It was always “did this program move behavior that wouldn’t have moved otherwise?” Australia just made it impossible to pretend that distinction doesn’t matter.
What does the path forward actually look like?
Merchant-funded value becomes the new engine. Partnerships and targeted offers start replacing passive earn as the primary funding mechanism. Attribution stops being a reporting exercise and becomes a survival skill. And liability management shifts from static actuarial models to dynamic, behavior-responsive ones. This is loyalty performance management.
Maybe most importantly… programs that have been living inside the transaction need to start expanding into the full behavioral ecosystem around it. The moment of decision. The channel. The context. The relationship. That’s where the real value lives.
Coalition and closed-loop models have a genuine structural advantage here. They pool funding, share signal, and can deliver value at moments that a single-brand program simply can’t reach. In a market where interchange is compressing, scale and shared data infrastructure matter more than ever.
The programs that win this next chapter won’t be the ones with the highest earn rates. They’ll be the ones closest to the customer when it counts… and able to prove it.
That’s exactly the kind of model GRAVTY was built to deliver. Not loyalty as a cost center… but loyalty as a performance engine: where every interaction is measurable, every reward dollar is accountable, and growth is something you can actually point to.
