When the whole payments industry was racing to let shoppers buy now and pay later, Accrue asked a quieter question: what if a brand paid its customers to save first? Founded in 2021 in New York by Michael Hershfield, the company built its first product - a "save now, buy later" checkout option - as a deliberate inversion of the BNPL boom. Instead of extending a loan at the register, Accrue let people set aside money toward a purchase and earn rewards from the brand for doing it.
That contrarian bet has since grown into something larger. Today Accrue describes itself as powering "modern customer loyalty at the payment layer." Its platform centers on a brandable, stored-value wallet that merchants embed directly into their checkout. Once a customer funds that wallet, the brand has a direct financial relationship that no card network or marketplace sits in the middle of - and, Accrue argues, a far more durable form of loyalty than a points balance.
"The future of customer loyalty is in the balance."
The logic is simple enough to fit on a checkout button. A customer who has pre-loaded money into a brand has already decided where they are spending it. Refunds go back into the wallet rather than out the door. And a low-cost pay-by-bank rail gives shoppers a reason to pay directly from their bank account - cutting the fees merchants hand to card giants on every sale. Accrue reports that once a wallet is live, basket size grows and return visits climb: it cites a 45% lift in average order value and a 25% increase in shopper frequency across its merchants.
Hershfield is an unlikely fintech founder. Before Accrue he spent more than three years as Senior Vice President of Sales at WeWork, and helped found the startup Nucleus as its COO. He holds a law degree from the University of British Columbia and a political science degree from McGill. What he brought to Accrue was less a banking pedigree than a salesperson's read on what actually keeps customers coming back.
