Loyalty platform selection: what to ask about roadmap, upgrades, and AI before you sign

57% of brand marketers say platform limitations are a top challenge for their loyalty program. That comes from Loyalty360's State of Customer Loyalty study of about 100 brands, where 64% were still exploring enhancements or a full overhaul.

Now put that next to the demo. Someone configures a tier, launches a promotion, opens a dashboard. It all works. What the demo room can't show is how the platform will cope in three years, when your program offers members far more than it does today and carries far more members, partners, and traffic.

Our position: choose a loyalty platform for the program you'll run in 2029, and judge it by the vendor's roadmap and track record, not by the demo. Below, we open up the Comarch Loyalty roadmap so you can apply that test to us.

What the 2025-2026 research says about loyalty technology

Loyalty teams are being asked to do more with less. Gartner's Market Guide for Loyalty Program Vendors (May 2026) reports that CMOs gave loyalty program management an average 4.3% of marketing budgets in 2026, a 22% drop year on year. The same guide finds that only 49% of marketing technology capabilities are actually used, held back by weak customer data foundations and integration problems. With less budget and half the stack idle, a loyalty platform has to get easier to run every year, not harder.

Analysts also score the future. In The Forrester Wave™: Loyalty Platforms, Q4 2025, vision and roadmap each carry 15% of the strategy score.

Program growth has two sides. The business side is the proposition: new mechanics, new partners, new reasons to engage. The technical side is what that success does to the platform: more members, more partners, more integrations, and real-time traffic that tends to peak at the worst possible moment. All of it arrives after you sign, and no demo can show it. The best evidence of how the platform will cope is the vendor's roadmap, and its record of delivering on it.

Three programs that kept growing after go-live

• Alshaya Group launched its Aura program in 2022 and rolled it out in phases on an API-first architecture. Aura is now one loyalty ecosystem for more than 50 brands in five Gulf markets, and its next stages are already on the joint plan.
• Globe Telecom moved Globe Rewards from classic earn-and-burn to an everyday digital experience. Its gamified mechanics, launched in 2025, reached 1.2 million players within four months. Tiers, badges, and advanced missions come next.
• Azul Airlines scaled its program to 20 million members on the same platform, with the reliability and scalability its IT team asked for from day one.

All three programs kept growing after launch on the same platform. That only works when the platform's roadmap grows with them, which is how we build ours.

How Comarch Loyalty builds its roadmap

The Comarch Loyalty roadmap has three inputs and one discipline for turning them into a product.

The first input is our clients. Comarch Loyalty programs run in retail, fuel, airlines, hospitality, telco, and financial services, in dozens of markets. Change requests, RFP questions, user group sessions, and support tickets show us where operators lose time and where volumes are about to jump. When a fuel retailer and an airline ask for the same thing, it stops being a customization and becomes a product, available to everyone. In its 2025 evaluation, Forrester gave us the highest possible score for community, citing "an exceptionally busy live-event schedule and a large online community."

The second is the market. Airlines are moving from distance-based to revenue-based earning, and alliance partners from overnight batch files to real-time APIs. Retailers want to reward reviews, receipts, and challenges, not only spend. Banks now reward non-card relationships and they need it real-time. Brands want to reach customers before they join the program, not after.

The third is technology. Integrations with partners and client systems run as standalone microservices that scale on their own, so a high-traffic partner feed gets its own resources without slowing the core platform. The same approach already powers one-time passwords and subscriptions in Comarch Loyalty services, so peaks in one area don't slow the rest. Forrester described the roadmap as "focused on automation, AI, and modularity."

The discipline is simple. Every planning increment reserves capacity for stability, performance, and technical improvements, so growing volumes never wait for the next big release. New features start with user research and benchmarking, prototypes are tested with real users before production code is written, and each release is measured against agreed KPIs after launch. We share the roadmap with clients so they can plan around it.

Four pillars, and why AI isn't one of them

The roadmap rests on four pillars, each answering a finding from the research above.

1. Easier to run: fewer clicks, less IT dependency, faster time to market.
2. More effective and cost-efficient: every point and every discount has to earn its place in the P&L.
3. More attractive for members: reasons to engage beyond the next transaction, and ways to reach customers before they join.
4. Built to scale and easy to upgrade: more members, partners, and real-time traffic without a re-implementation, and new capabilities that arrive as configuration instead of projects.

Artificial Intelligence isn't on that list on purpose. Many vendors put it at the top of their roadmap, but for us, it is the foundation of all four of these pillars. We start from the problem a client needs solved and pick the best tool for it, and in recent years that tool has often been AI.

What Comarch Loyalty has shipped, and what comes next

Spend less to get more

The AI Generosity Model in Comarch Loyalty predicts the smallest discount that will still make a member act. Budget goes where it changes behavior instead of subsidizing purchases that would have happened anyway. Propensity of Next Visit then picks when to send the offer, how long to keep it valid, and when a rescue offer is needed. Promotion Results Prediction, coming next, shows the expected ROI before a campaign goes live.

Stop waiting for IT

The redesigned Business Rules Engine, now rolling out, lets business users define and test earning and tier rules themselves. The AI Integrator lets them tune model parameters on their own. From 2027, the Loyalty Agent, our agentic AI assistant, will draft promotions, campaigns and message templates for the team to approve. Ideas reach the market in days, not sprints.

Give members a reason to come back

Spin the Wheel rewards useful actions such as completing a profile. Refer a Friend shows the status of every invitation in real time. The new Tiers view makes clear what the next level unlocks. Next is the Decaying Discount, an offer that counts down in real time until the shopper joins the program to lock it in, which turns anonymous customers into identified members.

Grow without a re-implementation

The next generation of Comarch Loyalty Management is built as modular loyalty domains, from identifiers and point types to accrual and tiers. Configurable Customer Data Points let custom attributes perform like standard fields without code changes. External Data Replication connects new data sources through configuration, and schema changes flow through instead of breaking data pipelines. For clients, that means more members, partners, and traffic on the same platform, and upgrades that feel like configuration instead of a new project.

Three questions to ask any loyalty vendor

Loyalty programs rarely fail on day one. They fail slowly, when the platform stops keeping up with what the business needs. Before your next renewal or RFP, ask:

1. What did you ship in the last twelve months that clients actually use?
2. How does a client's request become part of the product?
3. What will your next upgrade cost me?

We're happy to answer all three for Comarch Loyalty. Our roadmap is open for discussion, and we'd like to hear what yours looks like.

In the meantime, consider this: over 35% of global consumers already use AI tools to research loyalty programs. Our report, Loyalty as a Growth Engine in the AI Era, looks at what that means for how you design, personalize, and grow yours. Get the report today.

Sources

1. Loyalty360, 2025 State of Customer Loyalty Report, July 2025.
2. Gartner, Market Guide for Loyalty Program Vendors, Brad Jashinsky and Halle Stern, 27 May 2026.
3. Comarch, Comarch Named a Strong Performer in Loyalty Platforms Evaluation by Independent Research Firm, December 2025.
4. Comarch, How Alshaya Group and Comarch created a unified loyalty ecosystem.
5. Comarch, How Globe Telecom turned loyalty into an everyday digital experience.
6. Comarch, How Azul Airlines scaled to 20 million loyal members.
7. Marek Klimek, How should an optimal design process look?, Comarch, October 2022.