Loyalty Technology Solutions

Forrester renamed this category in 2025, from Loyalty Technology Solutions to Loyalty Platforms, and the final edition under the old name is The Forrester Wave: Loyalty Technology Solutions, Q1 2023. The name change is small, but the market between the two editions is not.

The final edition under the old name: The Forrester Wave: Loyalty Technology Solutions, Q1 2023

The Q1 2023 Wave evaluated twelve vendors against twenty eight criteria across current offering, strategy, and market presence. The field: Annex Cloud, Bond Brand Loyalty, Capillary Technologies, Comarch, Epsilon, Kobie, Mastercard, Merkle, Oracle, Punchh, Salesforce, and Tenerity.

The criteria framework reveals what the market was in 2023: member data management, loyalty program management, marketing, and measurement on the offering side, product vision, enhancements, partner ecosystem, and commercial model on the strategy side, and revenue and loyalty customer counts on market presence.

Only one placement is publicly confirmed from this edition: Kobie, a Leader, which went on to be the only Leader in the Loyalty Services Wave of Q2 2024, making it the only loyalty vendor confirmed as a Leader in both the technology and services evaluations at the time.

What the 2023 scorecard was measuring

The 2023 criteria are the market's self-portrait before the platform era. Loyalty was scored as a suite: the member database, the program rules, the campaigns, the measurement dashboards. The buyer was a loyalty marketer assembling a program, and the vendors were specialists selling components.

The field tells the same story. Agencies, Merkle and Epsilon. Pure plays, Kobie, Capillary, Annex Cloud, Bond. Enterprise stacks, Oracle, Salesforce, with their loyalty modules. Payments infrastructure, Mastercard. Restaurant-specific capability, Punchh. The field was a map of loyalty's fragments before consolidation.

The twenty eight criteria themselves are a taxonomy of the fragmented era: member data management as its own discipline, program management as its own discipline, measurement as its own discipline. Every criterion was a module a buyer could buy separately, which is why the category was plural. The old name fit that market: technology solutions, plural, because buyers assembled solutions from pieces, and the scorecard was the assembly manual.

The name it took next

Where the market went is documented in the successor evaluation, The Forrester Wave: Loyalty Platforms, Q4 2025, which scored eleven vendors against twenty seven criteria and carried the renamed title.

The confirmed placements describe the consolidation. Epsilon a Leader. Capillary Technologies a Leader, with the highest scores among all vendors in both Current Offering and Strategy and 5 of 5 scores in twenty two of twenty seven criteria. Kobie a Leader again, with a Customer Favorite designation and the highest possible score in twenty one of twenty seven criteria, cited for "human-level" personalization through its Bonnie AI assistant, data unification via its Panoramic Customer Profile, and agentic AI monitoring that reports model accuracy metrics. Loyalty Juggernaut announced a Strong Performer placement.

The rename from solutions to platforms is the market's verdict on itself. The buyer stopped assembling fragments and started buying the platform, and the scorecard followed.

The three changes between the two names

Set the 2023 criteria next to the 2025 confirmations and three shifts appear.

First, personalization became the product. Kobie's 2025 citation leads with "human-level" personalization and AI assistance, capabilities the 2023 scorecard measured as marketing modules. Where the 2023 scorecard saw campaign components, the 2025 confirmations see a continuous personalization engine, and the difference is the difference between a campaign tool and a revenue system. Second, data unification became the differentiator. The Panoramic Customer Profile concept, one customer record across all touchpoints, is a platform claim, not a solution claim. Third, AI moved from roadmap to supervision. Agentic AI that reports its own model accuracy is the 2025 edition's frontier, and nothing in the 2023 criteria anticipated it.

The old scorecard measured programs. The new one measures platforms that run programs, personalize them, and audit themselves.

None of the 2023 criteria asked a vendor how its AI models were performing, or whether anyone was watching them. The 2025 citations make that question the headline. Two years turned a capability no one scored into the criterion the Leaders lead with, which is the definition of a market moving faster than its own scorecard.

The honest limits of the old record

One confirmed placement out of twelve is a thin public record, and this article assigns no tiers the record does not support. The 2023 edition's full tier table has not surfaced.

There is also a timing caveat. The Q1 2023 scorecard predates the generative AI wave that dominates the 2025 confirmations, and a buyer benchmarking vendors against the old criteria is benchmarking against a market that no longer exists. The old edition is best read as the roster document of loyalty's fragmented era, not as current guidance.

Three questions before you buy the platform

Which of your loyalty problems is a platform problem, and which is a program problem? The 2023 scorecard answers the second. The 2025 one answers the first. Most buyers have both, and the vendor who treats them as one will underdeliver on one of them.

What does the AI actually measure about itself? The 2025 frontier is agentic monitoring of model accuracy. Ask each vendor to show the accuracy report for its personalization models on your member base, and treat a refusal as a score.

Where does your member data live when the contract ends? Data unification is the new differentiator, which makes data portability the new risk. Get the export contract before the platform contract. And if your problem is both platform and program, the 2023 field's map still applies: you may need the platform vendor for one half and a specialist for the other, exactly as the old name assumed.

Forrester does not endorse any vendor named here, and tier placement should not be read as a recommendation to buy.

See also Omnichannel Advertising Platforms, where forrester killed the term DSP and replaced it with this category name, arguing that AI agents now interact with publishers directly and remove the need for the centralized buying interface the old term described.