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Turning €100M+ of forgotten money into a reason to come back

My Role

  • Led the product vision, strategy, and experience direction for the Decathlon Wallet, a strategic omnichannel payments initiative.

  • Identified the customer and commercial opportunity and shaped the business case for consolidating fragmented customer value.

  • Transformed disconnected credits, refunds, gift cards, and rewards into a vision for a scalable customer value and payments platform.

  • Defined the omnichannel experience strategy, connecting online, app, checkout, and in-store customer journeys.

  • Aligned senior stakeholders across Payments, POS, Loyalty, Finance, CRM, Product, and Digital around a shared vision and roadmap.

  • Connected customer insight, commercial impact, and product strategy to influence investment and prioritisation decisions.

  • Drove cross-functional alignment across a complex global organisation, establishing the foundations for a unified wallet ecosystem at scale.

Executive Summery

Decathlon Wallet was a strategic payments and customer retention initiative designed to transform €100M+of fragmented, unused customer value into a seamless digital balance customers could easily discover and spend. The initiative identified a major opportunity across gift cards, loyalty rewards, refunds, and promotional credits  where customers already had purchasing power, but friction prevented them from using it.

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Every year, roughly €300M+  gets activated onto Decathlon prepaid cards. Gift cards, loyalty vouchers, refund credits, commercial promotions. Most of it gets spent. But almost €60M doesn't. It just sits there, expiring quietly in email inboxes.

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More that 9 million loyalty members, one in five across our membership countries  were sitting on points they'd never converted, worth an estimated €200M+  in missed revenue. Meanwhile, a third of refunded money never came back into the ecosystem at all.

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The proposal was deliberately simple to say out loud: collapse every form of Decathlon credit , gift cards, vouchers, loyalty rewards, refunds, into a single cash balance in a Decathlon Wallet, visible and spendable in one click, in store and online.​

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The strategy focused on removing payment friction at critical moments: automatically surfacing available Wallet balance during checkout, simplifying in-store redemption through POS integration, and enabling teams to use Wallet as a scalable platform for customer incentives and retention. By improving redemption rates, reducing operational complexity, and keeping more customer value within the Decathlon ecosystem, the Wallet created a significant growth opportunity while improving the customer experience.

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The Challenge

Decathlon had a significant amount of customer value trapped across disconnected systems: gift cards, loyalty points, refunds, and promotional credits. While customers already owned this value, fragmented experiences made it difficult to discover, access, and spend.
 

Customers struggled to redeem rewards, locate gift cards, and apply credits during checkout, resulting in unused balances, lost repeat purchase opportunities, and value leaving the Decathlon ecosystem. Internally, multiple teams managed different forms of customer value through separate processes, creating operational complexity and limiting visibility into customer behaviour.
 

The challenge was to transform these fragmented value sources into a single, simple, omnichannel experience that made customer credit as easy to use as money  while creating a scalable payments platform that could drive retention, increase redemption, and unlock significant commercial value.

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Designing the Process

Because dozens of teams needed to contribute, the design process became just as important as the artefacts it produced. The programme was structured into several phases:

Phase 1: Identified the Opportunity Through Customer and Business Insights

We started by understanding why customers were not using value they already owned. Research, behavioural data, and financial analysis revealed that the issue was not a lack of customer interest — it was friction. Customers found loyalty conversion complex, struggled to locate vouchers and gift cards, and often lost refund value outside the Decathlon ecosystem.

We quantified the opportunity by analysing unused balances, redemption rates, customer segments, and operational costs, revealing a potential €141M revenue opportunity.

Phase 2: Reframed the Problem From Rewards to Payments

The key strategic shift was moving away from viewing loyalty points, vouchers, and refunds as separate programmes. Instead, we reframed them as different forms of the same thing: customer-owned value.

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The vision became: One balance. One Wallet. Available everywhere.
 

This transformed the Wallet from a loyalty feature into a payments and retention platform

Phase 3: Defined the Omnichannel Wallet Experience

We designed a unified experience across the moments where value matters most:

Online checkout

  • Surface available Wallet balance automatically

  • Show value in euros rather than points

  • Enable one-click application of credit
     

Physical stores

  • Connect Wallet balances with POS systems

  • Allow customers to authenticate through the app

  • Enable cashiers to recognise and apply available value instantly
     

The goal was to remove decision-making and make using customer value the default behaviour.

Phase 5: Aligned Multiple Teams Around a Shared Vision

Because the Wallet crossed Loyalty, Payments, POS, Finance, CRM, Commercial, and Engineering, the biggest challenge was organisational alignment.
 

We created a shared narrative supported by:

  • Customer pain points

  • Experience gaps

  • Market benchmarks

  • Financial opportunity sizing

  • Technical feasibility considerations
     

This helped teams move from owning individual programmes to collaborating around one customer value ecosystem.

Phase 5: Built the Business Case and Prioritised the Rollout

To reduce risk, we created a phased approach:
 

  1. Validate the concept internally

  2. Test through employee adoption

  3. Launch a two-store proof of concept

  4. Expand into priority markets
     

Countries were prioritised based on:

  • Customer opportunity

  • Market readiness

  • POS capabilities

  • Stakeholder alignment
     

Spain and France were selected as initial focus markets.

Phase 6: Created a Foundation for Long-Term Growth

The Wallet established a scalable foundation for future customer value experiences by enabling Decathlon to:
 

  • Increase redemption rates

  • Improve customer retention

  • Reduce voucher complexity

  • Lower operational costs

  • Create new CRM and loyalty opportunities
     

The result was a shift from fragmented rewards and credits toward a unified customer value platform embedded into the Decathlon payment experience.

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