We are thrilled to welcome SKUx as the newest member of the Innovative Payments Association (IPA). SKUx is an innovative fintech platform designed to modernize how brand incentives and rewards are delivered and redeemed. By layering real-time, item-level payments over existing systems, SKUx ensures every reward dollar is spent exactly as intended. To get to know SKUx more, we sat down with CEO and Co-Founder, Bobby Tinsley (pictured right).

New Member Q&A with Bobby Tinsley

How would you describe SKUx? We help brands ensure every reward dollar is spent as intended. Through our built-in guardrails and easy mobile wallet delivery, we help companies drive spending that meets their strategic goals while managing the rewards program for them.

What is the primary problem SKUx solves for its customers? We solve the challenges associated with slow and fraud-prone payment and coupon systems that lack item-level control. We layer real-time payments over these systems to guarantee that funds—whether they are brand incentives, loyalty rewards, or disaster relief aid—are spent on the specific "approved" goods intended.

Which industries do you primarily serve? While our technology is payment-type agnostic, we see significant impact in consumer goods, retailers, disaster relief and health and wellness, specifically for promotions, healthy food, and OTC benefits. We have had the privilege of working with amazing partners including Mondelēz International, makers of Oreos and other snack foods, AAA, Reynolds Consumer Products, makers of Reynolds Wrap, and others.

What makes the SKUx approach unique in the payments ecosystem? Precision and speed. While many providers focus on the payment type, we focus on a purpose-driven network that offers universal item-level control and real-time data. Our platform is built for modern, plug-and-play commerce, allowing for faster deployment and real-time transparency into how funds are used.

What do you see as the next big trends in the fintech space? The industry – even beyond our industry – is moving toward agentic commerce. As AI agents begin to handle more research and decision-making on behalf of consumers, payments need to become more intelligent and perform differently than before. Our unique position, embedded at core item-level within the nation’s leading point-of-sale systems was designed with this shift in mind. 

About SKUx

SKUx provides a purpose-driven network that combines easy mobile wallet delivery with granular transaction controls. Their platform allows brands to bypass legacy coupon systems and replace them with secure, digital payments that can be restricted by merchant category, location, and all the way down to the SKU-level. This item-level precision helps eliminate fraud and waste while providing brands with 360-degree visibility into how funds are used in real-time.

The end of penny production may reshape the way that stores try to manage their payments costs.
Here’s why.

Customers may find more stores offering discounts for cash if the rules around rounding at the point of sale change.
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Skeptics will argue that nothing will change, citing the “Merchant Steering of Consumer Payment Choice,” study released by the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston this month, that shows that even when merchants offer cash discounts, customers who prefer cards stick with cards.

But here’s the rub: places where people shop most frequently – grocery stores and convenience stores – aren’t allowed to offer cash discounts if they want to accept SNAP cards. The SNAP equal treatment provisions (7 CFR 278.2(b) and 7 CFR 274.7(f)) require that SNAP recipients cannot be treated differently than shoppers paying with cash or cards.

That means the merchants with the most transactions can’t steer at all. Meanwhile, the businesses that can offer cash discounts — gas stations, restaurants — are operating in a world where the biggest players don’t participate. If only one stop on a shopper’s list offers a cash discount, the convenience of sticking with one payment method usually outweighs the savings.

But the loss of the penny may change all of this. Grocery stores have been trying to collect pennies precisely because of the equal treatment provisions. (See my blog on Giant Eagle collecting pennies for more details.)
However, banking and retail trade groups have been pushing for the government to address the rounding issue.

If Congress or USDA ends up issuing legislation, regulations, or guidance that allows rounding and different treatment for cash customers, then the retailers who’ve been shut out of steering may suddenly have new tools to influence payment choice.

Merchants that want to steer payments are hampered by an ecosystem that prevents it. The disappearance of the penny might be the catalyst that changes everything.

The Federal Reserve reads people’s diaries every October to understand what is happening to the U.S. payments landscape.

Their annual report, 2025 Findings from the Diary of Consumer Payment Choice, reveal that a lot of conventional wisdom about payments preferences are correct, but there are still some interesting data points.

The Fed asks people to keep a diary for three days in October that covers all the payments they make and how much cash they have on their person and how much they keep stashed against emergencies.

The 2025 report covers the diary period for 2024. It found that the average number of payments a person made per month was 48, up from 46 in 2023. It will be interesting to see whether the number of payments continued to climb in 2025, or if inflation cools consumer spending at all.

As one might expect, younger people (18-24) were more likely to use their mobile phones to pay for things, and less likely to use cash.

But what is interesting is that the average number of cash payments has held steady at 7 payments per month since 2021. Cash is a smaller portion of over all payments, but it still has a baseline.

What is interesting, though is that cash use remains steady at places like grocery stores, convenience stores, and restaurants. The Fed doesn’t get into why, but I suspect it is because all demographics and income levels need to get groceries and want to go out to eat. So, the floor is maintained over time by older people and lower-income shoppers. But as demographics shift, cash use may continue to fall below the apparent floor.

The Fed is doing an observational study here, so it is hard to see correlations with inflation and other macroeconomic factors, but as we interpret this data, the big picture is worth keeping in mind.

Here’s an example, the report points out that the average amount of cash that people kept stashed somewhere rose in 2020 to $299 but actually peaked in 2022 at $418. My guess is that the Delta and Omicron waves of Covid, combined with extra money from relief programs, led people to keep more cash on hand in case the world got disrupted again. The number was down to $306 by 2024, but that could have been a combination of people relaxing and wanting to spend again.

It will be interesting to see what happened in 2025 as consumers dealt with inflation and more economic uncertainty. Multi-factor analysis on this kind of thing is tough. But here are some factors that I think will influence consumer payment choice:

1. Inflation
2. Expectations about the economy
3. Employment levels

Another factor that I think will matter is merchant behavior. Are businesses offering incentives to steer payments?
If a cap on credit card rates does come into effect, will a loss in rewards affect shoppers’ payments choices? I suspect it would.  If a cap also led to fewer people getting credit, that could have a dramatic effect on the payments mix – thought we might not see that until later in 2026 or even 2027.

Companies with the resources might want to create their own diary to see how their customers are interacting with the tools they offer and what they use when they go outside the confines of the product suite.
When the new report comes out, we’ll come back to compare the results and see what trends we can spot in the data and what might be driving them.