Do many brands make light work? Exploring the coalition and “omni-app” loyalty models

The average consumer is a member of more loyalty programmes than they actively use. Our consumer research across four European markets found that the majority of respondents hold between one and three active loyalty memberships, but that number understates the reality. Many have downloaded loyalty apps for a one-time discount, accumulated points they've never redeemed, and quietly stopped engaging with programmes they technically still belong to.

App fatigue is real, and it's growing. Every week, new brands launch loyalty apps asking consumers to download, register, scan and engage. Every week, more of those apps sit unopened on the third page of a folder consumers never visit. The brands doing this aren't necessarily failing because their programmes are bad, but because the model asks too much from consumers who are already managing more brand relationships than they have attention for.

The coalition loyalty model offers a structural response to this problem. Instead of asking consumers to maintain dozens of separate brand relationships, coalition programmes aggregate value across multiple partners into a single currency, a single app and a single relationship. The consumer earns more, redeems more flexibly and carries one app instead of many. Similarly for the omni-app model, customers have a destination app that offers multiple services, added value, and the ease of one place to find everything they need; from loyalty rewards to entertainment to content to subscriptions services to ecommerce.

These models, in theory, provide solutions that works for everyone. In practice, it's more complicated than that.

How we got here: the rise of coalition and omni-app

The coalition model isn't new. What's new is the conditions that are making it more compelling than at any previous point in the loyalty market's history.

Three forces are converging. First, app fatigue; consumers are reaching the limit of the number of brand relationships they can meaningfully maintain on their phones. The continued appearance of new single-brand loyalty apps has created exactly the fragmented, noisy experience that our Gen Z consumer research captures most sharply: "There are too many apps. So many loyalty schemes that I think you end up just blanking them out."

Second, rising consumer expectations around simplicity and immediate value. Our research consistently shows that quick and easy experiences rank alongside exclusive pricing as the top loyalty drivers. A coalition programme that consolidates loyalty value across multiple brands into one effortless experience is a direct structural response to both of those priorities.

Third, the increasing sophistication of the technology infrastructure available to build coalition programmes. The integration complexity that made coalition loyalty architecturally challenging a decade ago is significantly reduced by modern API infrastructure, cloud platforms and the kind of real-time data orchestration that brands like Spenn are demonstrating in production today.

The result is a model that is being reinvented for the current era; a single mobile destination that connects consumers to value across multiple brands and categories in a personalised, dynamic experience. Similarly, the omni-app model, more often a single brand-led experience, offers a hub of multiple services and experiences in one convenient place. Whichever model you move towards, the level of customer convenience is high, whilst the ability to drive new revenue also reaches new heights.

The European landscape: three models, three lessons

The European loyalty market offers three distinct case studies in how coalition thinking plays out at scale, each instructive in different ways.

Payback: the established giant

Payback is the most prominent coalition loyalty programme in Europe. Launched in Germany in 2000 and now spanning over 700 partner brands across Germany and Austria, from REWE and dm to Aral, eBay and Zalando, it has more than 34 million active members and sits second in our entire European consumer top ten for favourite loyalty apps.

Its prominence reflects a fundamental difference in how German consumers think about loyalty. For much of the German market, loyalty is a relationship with a currency that works across the breadth of everyday life. Payback's dominance is a consumer expectation that has been shaped over 25 years and that any brand entering the German loyalty market needs to understand before it builds.

The lesson from Payback is that coalition programmes, done well and at sufficient scale, can become the infrastructure of a loyalty market rather than one option within it.

Nectar: the evolving UK model

In the UK, Nectar has occupied a similar, if narrower, coalition space since 2002. Originally spanning Sainsbury's, Debenhams, BP and a range of partners, Nectar was acquired outright by Sainsbury's in 2018 and has since evolved to become more deeply integrated with the supermarket's own loyalty proposition while retaining partner connections through British Gas, eBay and others. This one starts to feel more like an omni-app, where Sainsbury's is the main affiliated brand experience, but partner offers still come into play.

The Nectar story is interesting precisely because it illustrates the tension within coalition models. As Sainsbury's deepened its ownership and integration, Nectar moved closer to a single-brand programme with partner benefits than a true open coalition. That shift reflected the commercial logic of a supermarket wanting to own its customer relationship more directly, but it also narrowed the breadth of the value exchange that had made coalition thinking attractive in the first place.

The lesson from Nectar is that the coalition model requires genuine commitment to the breadth of the value exchange. A coalition programme that gradually consolidates around a single dominant partner is a different proposition from one that genuinely aggregates value across the full range of a consumer's everyday spending. That proposition is still a valid one, but it requires more thought around how to continue adding extra value to the customer whilst continuing to add new revenue streams that strengthen brand position.

Spenn: the next generation

The most instructive recent example of coalition loyalty architecture is neither the oldest nor the largest — it's the newest, and it's in the Nordics.

Spenn launched in November 2024, built by Apadmi, as a unified loyalty currency for Norwegian Airlines and Strawberry Hotels, two of the Nordic region's most significant consumer brands with a combined audience of over 29 million customers. The technical challenge was significant: migrating more than 7 million existing loyalty members from two separate programmes onto a single unified platform without disrupting existing memberships.

The result was an app built around a genuinely modern coalition vision. A dynamic home screen that personalises offers based on preferences and purchase history, described by Spenn's CEO Christoffer Sundby as something like "Instagram for benefits — an infinite scroll of partners and content... our attempt to solve the problem that a lot of people say they have around getting all this irrelevant loyalty information spammed into their inboxes."

Family accounts for pooling points, real-time balance visibility, full support for five Nordic languages. Since launch, Reitan Retail joined the ecosystem adding 2 million more customers, and further partners including Klarna, Fortum and Lensway have followed — extending Spenn's reach into banking, energy and retail.

On launch day, Spenn became the most popular app in the Nordics. The lesson from Spenn is that coalition loyalty, built around a genuinely consumer-centric proposition with strong mobile execution, can achieve scale and engagement that dwarfs what any single-brand programme could deliver.

The case for coalition and omni-app models: what the consumer data tells us

The appeal of these models to consumers rests on three foundations, each directly supported by our research.

Frequency. One of the fundamental challenges of single-brand loyalty outside grocery is that purchase occasions are too infrequent for members to accumulate meaningful value. A consumer who flies twice a year and stays in hotels on the same trips will never earn enough to feel genuinely rewarded by a single travel programme. A coalition that lets them earn across those flights, hotel stays, weekly fuel stops and monthly online shopping changes the economics entirely — the same consumer, with the same spend, reaches a meaningful redemption point far faster.

Meanwhile, an omni-app can offer more frequent reasons to open the app; checking stored value, managing financial services, accessing new exclusive content, discovering the latest rewards, making ecommerce purchases, or exploring new games. All these features drive consistent reason to return to the app beyond going shopping.

Flexibility. Our consumer research shows that relevant products ranked third in the loyalty priority list, ahead of prizes and customer service. The breadth of redemption options a well-constructed coalition programme offers is a direct response to that priority. A loyalty currency you can spend across a broad range of categories is inherently more relevant to more members more of the time than one locked to a single brand.

Similarly with an omni-app, the ability to better understand your customers wants and needs, and surface the most relevant rewards, offers, products and content, becomes easier than with a simple transaction-led app. By increasing frequency of customer interaction, and reaching different areas of the customer's life whether via financial services, entertainment and content, or with AI integrations, you get a richer view of each customer, and can therefore offer richer personalisation that gives customers more relevance than ever.

Simplicity. Coalition programmes, at their best, reduce the number of loyalty relationships a consumer needs to maintain. That's a direct structural response to app fatigue, and it resonates particularly strongly with younger consumers. One Gen Z respondent in our qualitative research put it plainly: "I think having one platform that aggregates many brands would be useful to simplify the process." The coalition model that has defined the German loyalty landscape for decades may be more relevant to the next generation across all European markets than many brands currently realise.

What makes coalition loyalty complicated

Coalition loyalty is not suitable for every brand. The brands and markets where coalition programmes have struggled offer equally important lessons.

Brand dilution. When a loyalty currency works across multiple brands, the relationship between any single brand and its most loyal customers becomes less exclusive. A consumer who is a Payback member first and a REWE customer second has a relationship with the coalition that mediates and potentially dilutes the individual brand relationship. For brands that have invested heavily in building direct customer relationships, ceding some of that relationship to a coalition operator involves a genuine trade-off that isn't always commercially justified.

Governance complexity. Coalition programmes require multiple brands to agree on earn rates, redemption values, data-sharing arrangements and programme mechanics, and to keep those agreements aligned as each brand's commercial priorities evolve. The governance overhead is significant, and the history of the model includes programmes that have contracted or restructured as partner relationships became difficult to sustain.

Differentiation. In markets where coalition loyalty is dominant, the question for individual brands is how to build a distinctive relationship with their most valuable customers when the primary loyalty mechanic is shared with hundreds of other brands. The answer typically involves layering brand-specific benefits; exclusive experiences, priority access, elevated service, on top of the coalition currency rather than relying on the coalition alone to drive brand loyalty. That layering adds complexity and cost that partially offsets the coalition model's structural advantages.

The omni-app horizon: could this become the dominant model?

Whilst the coalition model has a structural tailwind, it is not a universal answer. The right loyalty architecture for any given brand depends on purchase frequency, margin economics, data strategy ambitions, competitive context and the depth of direct customer relationship the brand is trying to build. For those that find the cons outweigh the pros when it comes to building a full coalition model, an omni-app model may be more suitable. You can still bring in partner offers where appropriate, but the remainder of the experience remains part of your brand, and the chance to build that brand affiliation is stronger.

For high-frequency grocery and convenience retailers, the economics of a standalone programme with strong member pricing typically justify the investment. Tesco Clubcard and Co-op Members are not going anywhere — the frequency and margin structure of grocery retail make standalone loyalty not just viable but preferable. There is still an opportunity for these brands to move towards an omni-app model that drives even more frequency, but a full coalition model may create unnecessary brand dilution.

For lower-frequency brands in travel, financial services, specialist retail or utilities, the coalition model may offer a more realistic path to delivering meaningful loyalty value at scale. A travel brand that connects its loyalty currency to the grocery shop, the fuel station and the energy bill creates touchpoints for earning and engagement that the travel experience alone could never generate.

The brands that will lead loyalty in the next decade are the ones asking whether the architecture they're building into is the right one for their customers, their market and the loyalty landscape that's emerging around them. What seems increasingly clear is that the fragmented landscape of dozens of individual single-brand programmes, each asking consumers to maintain a separate relationship, carry a separate app and accumulate value slowly within a single brand's ecosystem, is not the direction the market is heading.

The consumer data from our research says it plainly: fewer programmes, more value, less friction. The coalition model and the omni-app models, when done well, are the most direct structural response to all three pain points.

The question now is whether the brands that haven't yet embraced these models are watching closely enough to act before the window closes.

The full findings from Apadmi's 2026 Digital Customer Loyalty Report are available to download now.