White Paper: The Merit Rewards Platform

Merit is a sales-incentive and trade-promotion platform for the hospitality and retail industries. Brands pay Merit to run marketing through a staff wallet; frontline staff earn fiat rewards from a brand-funded budget once a sale is proven; everyone is paid out through Revolut. This paper outlines the model, the proof-of-sale verification that underpins it, the double-entry ledger that keeps every movement of money provably consistent, and the compliance posture that makes payouts legitimate. The architecture is deliberately asset-agnostic, so a regulated digital-asset settlement layer can be added later without re-engineering the platform.

Problem Statement

Traditional staff incentive programs in the service industry suffer from inefficiency, opacity, and delayed reward cycles. Upselling and promotional efforts are often under-compensated or inconsistently tracked. Cash-based tipping is vulnerable to manipulation, taxation ambiguity, and labour disputes. Brands, meanwhile, spend on trade promotions with little proof that the spend reached the people who actually drove the sale, and venues juggle spreadsheets and disconnected POS data with no real-time visibility.

Proposed Solution

Merit lets a brand fund a promotion, invite venues, and reward staff in fiat the moment a qualifying sale is verified. Funds are held against the promotion in a transparent, auditable ledger; rewards accrue to each staff member's wallet on an approved, proof-backed claim; and staff withdraw to their own bank account through Revolut. No token, no crypto, and no on-chain step are required to participate. Every value movement is recorded as a balanced, double-entry transaction, so balances are derived from posted entries and are provably consistent.

How It Works

  1. Fund — a brand funds a promotion; the budget is credited to a brand-budget account in the ledger.
  2. Activate & invite — the brand activates the promotion and invites eligible, active venues that accept brand invitations.
  3. Enrol — a venue manager opts the venue (or specific outlets) into the promotion.
  4. Claim — a staff member submits a sale and attaches proof.
  5. Verify — the proof is checked against one of three trust tiers, with a duplicate guard to prevent double-claiming.
  6. Approve & accrue — a reviewer approves; the reward (plus a transparent platform fee) is debited from the brand budget and the reward is credited to the staff wallet in fiat.
  7. Withdraw — the staff member withdraws to their bank via Revolut, gated on completed identity verification.

Ecosystem Participants

  • Brands (owners, agents, distributors, producers): fund and run promotions, target and invite venues, review claims, and monitor spend.
  • Venues (venue and outlet managers): opt their bars and outlets into promotions, confirm staff sales, and monitor participation.
  • Staff (barman, waiter, floor or outlet manager, retail sales assistant): see active promotions, submit a sale with proof, watch their balance grow, and withdraw to their bank.
  • Merit (platform & support): oversees organisations, venues and users, reviews and approves claims, settles payouts, and provides platform-wide reporting.

Proof of Sale

Rewards only accrue on a verified sale. Proof is pluggable and ranked by three trust tiers:

  • POS event — a sale confirmed directly through the venue's point-of-sale integration (highest trust).
  • Manager confirmation — a venue manager vouches for the sale in-app.
  • Receipt upload — a photographed receipt is read by OCR, fingerprinted by its content (merchant, total, date), and auto-verified when clean and high-confidence, or routed to manual review otherwise.

A content-based duplicate hash and a fraud score guard against re-used or manipulated proof, so the same sale cannot be claimed twice.

Money & the Ledger

All money is held in integer minor units (never floating-point), and balances are derived from posted entries (credits − debits), so totals are provably consistent. Every movement posts a balanced double-entry transaction:

  • Funding: debit platform float / credit brand budget.
  • Reward accrual: debit brand budget / credit staff wallet (and credit a platform-fee account).
  • Payout: reserve from the staff wallet to a clearing account, then settle to the bank rail on confirmation.

Payouts run through Revolut Business and settle automatically via a signature-verified webhook, with the same settlement path available to platform operations for reconciliation.

Tipping

Beyond brand-funded rewards, Merit supports direct customer tipping: a customer pays a staff member via a Revolut pay-link or QR code, and the confirmed payment is credited straight to the staff wallet. Venues can run tip pools that split a tip across active members by weight, and staff can split received funds with colleagues at their venue. Tips are withdrawn through the same payout flow as rewards.

Compliance & Privacy

Merit is built around data minimisation and auditability:

  • Identity: KYC is handled by an external provider; Merit stores only a verification status and an opaque reference — never raw documents.
  • Payout gating: withdrawals require completed (full) identity verification.
  • Tax & reporting: staff can export combined earnings (rewards, tips and payouts) for tax purposes; brands and venues get scoped reporting.
  • Auditability: append-only audit logs record every state change, and versioned consents capture acceptance of the current Terms and Privacy Policy, with re-prompting whenever a version changes.
  • Hardening & data residency: capability-based access control with per-record scope checks, idempotent money operations, encrypted transport, and an EU data-residency posture.

Economic Model

A brand funds a promotion and sets the fiat reward payable per qualifying sale. When a claim is approved, the reward plus a transparent platform fee is debited from the brand's funded budget; the staff member receives the full reward in fiat, and Merit retains the fee. There is no token to buy, no staking, and no price exposure for any participant — the unit of account is the local currency, and the brand always knows exactly what its budget bought.

Blockchain-Ready (Optional, Future)

Crypto is intentionally out of scope at launch for regulatory clarity, but the platform is engineered to keep that option open. The ledger keys money by asset, and every asset is classified as fiat or crypto. A future regulated stablecoin or token would be added as (1) a new asset record and (2) an additional settlement rail — with no change to accounts, transactions, claims, or promotions. Optionality is preserved in the design; it is not a dependency for the product to work today.

Roadmap

  • Foundation (delivered): the full platform — staff wallet, brand, venue and admin portals, the double-entry ledger, proof-of-sale verification across all three tiers, KYC, receipt OCR, the Revolut payout rail and settlement webhook, tipping with pooling and splitting, scoped reporting, and notifications.
  • Live rails & pilots: connect live provider credentials (Revolut Business, KYC, receipt OCR), finalise lawyer-reviewed legal copy, and run the first promotions in pilot venues.
  • Scale: broaden POS integrations, onboard more brands and venues, and extend multi-country tax and currency localisation.
  • Optional asset layer: if and when regulation allows, introduce a regulated digital-asset settlement option as an additional rail — without disrupting the fiat experience.

Conclusion

Merit offers a fair, transparent, and compliant incentive model for the service industry — one that pays staff in real money for sales they can prove, gives brands accountable trade-promotion spend, and gives venues real-time visibility. By grounding rewards in fiat and a provably consistent double-entry ledger, while keeping a regulated digital-asset path open for the future, the platform bridges the gap between staff performance, customer satisfaction, and brand ROI without putting regulatory or price risk on the people it serves.

JUNE 2026