Mintoak Buys ICC Loyalty to Create Unified Payments and Engagement Platform

The Mumbai-headquartered payments platform Mintoak has bought ICC Loyalty, a Dubai-based loyalty and rewards technology provider, to expand its footprint across the Middle East, Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia. The transaction merges merchant-side acquiring infrastructure with consumer-facing rewards programmes into a single offering aimed at banks operating in developing economies.

ICC Loyalty currently works with more than 30 banks and serves over 11 million customers in ten or more countries. Its client roster includes Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank, Emirates Islamic, Dubai Islamic Bank and RAKBANK. The platform powers personalised rewards programmes, targeted campaigns and lifecycle engagement tools designed to boost customer retention and transaction volumes.

Neither party disclosed the acquisition price. Mintoak stated that the combined entity generates more than $30 million in annual revenue with a profitability margin exceeding 30%, positioning the business for further geographic expansion. The revenue and margin figures were provided by Mintoak without independent verification.

Raman Khanduja, co-founder and chief executive of Mintoak, described the deal as a strategic shift rather than a simple add-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 merger would enable his firm to integrate Mintoak's AI and platform capabilities to deliver what he called hyper-personalisation for both existing and new clients.

After the acquisition, Mintoak says it now partners with more than 50 banks across 20 or more countries. Existing relationships span HDFC Bank, Axis Bank and SBI Payments in India, plus Absa Bank in Africa. The platform processes more than $93 billion in annual payment volume through a merchant base exceeding 5 million.

Investors in Mintoak include PayPal Ventures, British International Investment, HDFC Bank, Pravega Ventures and Z3Partners.

The deal reflects a broader structural change in the payments industry. As the underlying rails for card acceptance and transaction processing become more commoditised, margin opportunities for acquirers and payment platforms have narrowed. A growing number of players are responding by moving up the value chain into data analytics, loyalty and engagement, capturing more revenue from the bank-merchant-consumer ecosystem.

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

For Mintoak, near-term indicators of success will include 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.