The Smart Checkout Opportunity: Why Brands Are Ready to Fund a Smarter Checkout Ecosystem

The modern shopping basket has long served as a quiet archive of consumer intent, holding the exact answers to what buyers want, need, and value. Yet, for decades, brands and retailers have struggled to read those answers at the most critical juncture of the retail journey: the exact moment of payment. Traditional promotion models have historically relied on broad-stroke demographics, cumbersome paper coupons, or fragmented digital offers that require shoppers to proactively clip, search, and activate discounts before reaching the register. However, a sweeping transformation is underway across the retail and consumer packaged goods (CPG) landscapes, driven by the emergence of smart checkout technology capable of bridging the data gap between product selection and transaction completion.

According to a comprehensive new report titled The Smart Checkout Opportunity: Why Brands Are Ready to Fund a Smarter Checkout Ecosystem—produced by PYMNTS Intelligence in collaboration with financial technology leader FIS—an overwhelming 95% of brands are actively seeking smart checkout tools that can automatically identify eligible items in a consumer’s shopping basket and apply relevant offers at the moment of payment. This staggering consensus underscores a fundamental shift in how brands view promotional spending, customer loyalty, and the ultimate point of sale. Rather than viewing the checkout counter as a mere administrative necessity to finalize a transaction, industry leaders increasingly recognize it as a dynamic engagement channel with untapped revenue potential.

The Evolution of Promotional Strategy and the Traditional Coupon Gap

For generations, consumer packaged goods companies have invested heavily in marketing campaigns designed to capture consumer attention and stimulate volume growth. Despite these massive financial outlays, a persistent inefficiency has plagued the industry: the disconnect between broad advertising campaigns and individual purchasing behavior. Traditional promotional mechanisms, including newspaper circulars, mail-in rebates, and manual digital coupon apps, place the burden of execution squarely on the consumer. Shoppers are expected to remember which items are discounted, find the relevant coupons, and ensure they are scanned correctly at checkout.

This friction-heavy process often leads to missed savings for the consumer and lost sales opportunities for the brand. Furthermore, CPG manufacturers have historically struggled to track the precise efficacy of individual promotions in real time. Because much of the transactional data remains siloed within various retail ecosystems, brands frequently lack a clear, direct line of sight connecting their marketing data to the offers shoppers actually receive at the register. The inability to measure return on investment (ROI) at the granular level of the individual basket has left many brands searching for a more integrated, automated solution.

Smart basket technology offers a definitive answer to this systemic inefficiency. By leveraging advanced data analytics, Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), and real-time payment infrastructure, smart checkout systems can instantly analyze the contents of a physical or digital shopping cart, match those items against a database of active brand promotions, and apply instantaneous discounts without requiring any manual intervention from the consumer or the cashier. This seamless integration transforms the checkout lane from a potential bottleneck into a personalized value-add experience.

Insights from the PYMNTS Intelligence and FIS Collaboration

To understand the depth of industry readiness for this technological leap, the PYMNTS Intelligence and FIS study surveyed 63 manufacturers and brand owners of packaged consumer goods. These respondents represented a diverse cross-section of the retail economy, encompassing businesses that sell through grocery stores, general merchandise outlets, specialty retailers, restaurants and food service operations, and direct-to-consumer (D2C) channels.

Crucially, the survey targeted high-level decision-makers and organizational leaders holding direct responsibility for pricing, promotions, and marketing strategies. The findings reveal that market readiness is not concentrated solely among tech-native startups or mega-corporations; rather, enthusiasm for smart checkout ecosystems spans businesses of varying scales. Approximately 51% of the brands surveyed reported 2025 revenues of less than $1 billion, while roughly one-third—32%—reported annual revenues exceeding $10 billion. This broad-based participation indicates that both mid-market players and global conglomerates view automated, intelligent checkout promotions as a critical competitive necessity.

The survey data highlights a shared desire among these brand leaders to shift from reactive discounting to proactive, data-driven value delivery. By automating the application of discounts, brands can ensure that promotional dollars are spent with absolute precision, targeting the exact consumers who are already demonstrating intent to purchase competing or complementary products.

The Regulatory and Operational Frameworks Required for Success

While the appetite for smart checkout solutions is undeniably high, the transition to a fully realized, multi-brand promotional ecosystem is not without operational hurdles. Implementing a frictionless, automated discount engine requires complex coordination among multiple stakeholders within the retail value chain, including CPG brands, traditional brick-and-mortar retailers, e-commerce platform providers, and payment processors.

The PYMNTS Intelligence and FIS report delves deeply into the foundational controls and guardrails that brands demand before fully committing financial resources to these new ecosystems. Chief among these requirements is absolute clarity regarding data ownership. In an era marked by heightened consumer privacy regulations and stringent data governance standards, brand owners want explicit guarantees that the customer insights generated through smart checkout transactions will be transparently shared and securely managed.

Additionally, brand leaders emphasize the necessity of simple, standardized operating rules. For a smart checkout promotion to scale effectively across disparate retail chains, the technological protocols governing how offers are triggered and validated must be uniform and reliable. Brands also insist on retaining granular control over promotional parameters, including the precise ability to select which specific products qualify for offers, set budget caps, and define the duration and reach of targeted campaigns. Without these vital controls, brand executives express hesitation about surrendering promotional execution to automated third-party systems.

Retail Implications: Basket Size, Loyalty, and Consumer Experience

For retailers, the widespread adoption of smart checkout technology represents a powerful mechanism to enhance customer satisfaction while simultaneously driving key business metrics, most notably average basket size. As retail environments become increasingly competitive, offering tangible, frictionless value at the point of payment serves as a major differentiator in retaining consumer loyalty.

When shoppers experience automated savings—where discounts they may not have even known existed are gracefully applied to their totals—their perception of the retailer and the associated brands improves markedly. This positive reinforcement encourages repeat visits, higher engagement rates with loyalty programs, and larger overall transaction values. Furthermore, retailers stand to benefit from the enriched data streams generated by smart checkout systems. Access to deeper, real-time insights into purchasing patterns allows merchants to optimize inventory management, tailor in-store promotions, and curate product assortments that better align with local consumer demographics.

From a payments perspective, financial institutions and payment technology providers like FIS play a pivotal role in acting as the secure connective tissue between retailers and CPG brands. By embedding promotion-matching algorithms directly into the payment authorization workflow, payment processors can execute complex discount calculations in milliseconds, ensuring that the consumer experience remains uninterrupted and swift.

Industry Perspectives and Expert Analysis

Market analysts and industry stakeholders have responded enthusiastically to the findings of the PYMNTS Intelligence and FIS report, noting that the retail sector has reached an inflection point regarding promotional technology.

"The traditional promotional model is plagued by friction, waste, and a profound lack of attribution," notes a retail technology strategist specializing in point-of-sale modernization. "For years, brands have spent billions on marketing without truly knowing if a coupon drove a specific sale or simply rewarded a customer who was already going to buy the product. Smart checkout bridges that visibility gap. By automating relevance at the exact moment of payment, we are moving from a world of probabilistic marketing to a world of deterministic value delivery."

Another industry observer highlighted the economic pressures facing both consumers and brands in the current macroeconomic climate. With consumer price sensitivity remaining elevated, brands are under intense pressure to deliver meaningful value without permanently eroding their profit margins. Automated smart checkout systems allow brands to deploy targeted, highly efficient promotional incentives that stimulate volume without resorting to blanket price cuts that can devalue a brand’s equity over time.

Future Outlook: Turning the Vision into a Working Sales Channel

As the retail industry looks toward the remainder of the decade, the challenge ahead lies in moving smart checkout from a conceptual framework to a universally deployed commercial reality. The findings from "The Smart Checkout Opportunity: Why Brands Are Ready to Fund a Smarter Checkout Ecosystem" make it clear that the demand from the brand side is robust and well-capitalized.

The successful realization of this vision will depend heavily on collaboration and standardization. Retailers must be willing to open their point-of-sale architectures to integrated promotional networks, while payment providers and technology developers must ensure that their systems maintain the highest standards of data security, speed, and reliability. If these stakeholders can successfully align their operational interests, smart checkout has the potential to fundamentally redefine the modern shopping experience.

Ultimately, the PYMNTS Intelligence and FIS report serves as a strategic roadmap for industry leaders navigating the digital transformation of retail. By solving the historical disconnect between the shopping basket and the payment terminal, smart checkout promises to unlock a new era of efficiency, transparency, and value creation for brands, retailers, and consumers alike.