Fiserv, a global provider of payments and financial services technology, has launched Unknown Shopper, a new analytics capability designed to provide merchants and their marketing partners with enhanced insights into in-store customer behavior derived from card-present transactions.
Unknown Shopper aims to transform payment data into actionable insights, facilitating more relevant customer engagement and improved experiences. The solution, built on Fiserv’s payments intelligence platform and informed by billions of historical transactions, targets industries such as retail, restaurant, and fuel, where visibility into card-present transaction patterns has historically been limited.
In traditional card-present environments, merchants often lack detailed customer visibility unless transactions are linked to a loyalty program. This results in a significant portion of in-store activity remaining difficult to analyze or activate for marketing purposes. Unknown Shopper addresses this by enriching transaction data with demographic information, allowing businesses to understand in-store purchasing patterns and link transactions to actionable customer segments based on real purchase behavior, even without a formal loyalty program.
Through this capability, and with the assistance of their marketing partners, businesses can develop a more unified view of in-store and digital purchasing behavior at the segment level. The solution enables the creation of customer segments based on actual spending patterns rather than inferred demographics, facilitating the delivery of more relevant offers and experiences to non-loyalty customers. Additionally, it aims to improve campaign measurement and reduce media waste through stronger attribution and regularly refreshed insights.
Prasanna Dhore, Chief Data Officer at Fiserv, stated, “Unknown Shopper allows merchants to translate in-store transaction data into meaningful insights and customer segments—helping them serve their customers more effectively.”
Unknown Shopper is currently available to both merchants and marketing agencies. Fiserv is scheduled to demonstrate the solution at NRF 2026: Retail’s Big Show, held from January 11-13, at the Jacob J. Javits Convention Center, Booth #5451.
Fiserv, Inc., a Fortune 500 company, specializes in payments and financial technology. The company offers services including account processing, digital banking solutions, card issuer processing, network services, payments, e-commerce, merchant acquiring and processing, and its Clover point-of-sale system.
