Reward Gateway | Edenred summer product update: What’s new and what’s next

2025 was a milestone year for Reward Gateway | Edenred clients in Australia and New Zealand, with employees saving $31 million, a 10% year-on-year increase, with 1 in 12 working Australians now supported by our platform.  

As we step into 2026, we’re focused on three priorities that customers have told us matter the most: elevating the employee experience, driving admin and HR efficiency and unlocking future capabilities. 

In this Summer Product Update, you’ll find a host of enhancements designed to deliver more personal, mobile and impactful engagement. We’ve launched Wellbeing Centre 2.0 with a refreshed library of 1,000+ resources and more tailored discovery, expanded our discounts with leading retailers, and introduced Curated Rewards so you can align recognition with your values and initiatives. To make your platform more social, we’ve rolled out richer user profiles and the ability to add images to blog comments—helping employees connect and communicate in more meaningful ways. 

Looking ahead, we’re rolling out an AI-powered employee assistant and an AI Recognition Companion to remove friction and boost utilisation, plus a new Insights Builder for flexible, deeper reporting. Admins get more control with portal alerts and shared nomination limits, and our Workday partnership streamlines user provisioning and recognition sharing. 

Most excitingly, we’re accelerating toward the single app: Engage. You can test it now via Connect+; in April, SmartSpending will automatically update to Engage (discounts-only); and in July, Engage becomes your all-in-one employee engagement app. Early results show a 42% uplift in retention among beta users, with over 65% reporting faster load times and easier navigation, clear signs that your people are ready for what’s next. 

Let’s dive into what’s new and what’s coming up next. Keep reading below for more details. 

What's new

Wellbeing Centre

Our first exciting update for the day is that we have just launched our brand new and improved Wellbeing Centre, which is now live for all clients with the Wellbeing Centre enabled. The new Wellbeing Centre offers:

• An improved library with over 1,000 pieces of incredible content updated quarterly. This includes workouts from Sanctuary Health, financial resources from Nudge, and recipes from Hello Fresh. 

• A more personalised experience with tailored tools and recommendations that help employees find what matters faster and build habits that stick.   

• A new Featured tab with daily picks, expert highlights and saved content in one place - making it easy to discover something useful in seconds.   

• Improved discoverability thanks to a cleaner, more intuitive design that helps employees explore wellbeing resources with ease.   

• The ability to upload your own content to create a more bespoke wellbeing experience for your employees. This is currently limited to articles, but will be expanded to Audio and Video in March.  

The newly improved Wellbeing Centre allows you to deliver content that is personalised, easy to discover and highly impactful, helping your people manage their wellbeing and build healthy habits that make your people feel more supported and more engaged at work. 

A more personalised engagement experience

Another way we’re improving the experience we help to deliver to your employees is by continuing to elevate the personalisation of the communications we send your people, ensuring every message they receive is relevant and useful. 

This includes reminding people of the savings they can take advantage of at retailers we know they love, and letting employee know when they have an unused award balance.

Tailored communications like these are helping employees save more money on their regular shopping, and ensure that your rewards program is landing with maximum impact. 

Brand new discounts

Personalised communications aren’t the only way we’ve improved our employee discounts in the last few months. We’ve also added excited deals at a bunch of new retailers including: 

Toy World, Lululemon, Puma, Vans, Sportspower, Bras n Things, T2, Naked Wines, Adrenaline, Betta Electrical, Bobby Brown, Class Bento, Clinique, Collins Bookseller, Everyplate, Goldmark, Kobo Books, Amart, iSelect, Mater Lotteries, Beds n Dreams, Skydive Australia, Kokjo Black, Car Mods Australia, Butcher Crows, and Step 1.

Curated rewards

Personal, purposeful rewards are powerful. Our new Curated Rewards feature lets you build custom reward catalogues aligned to your values, initiatives, and audience. It’s available to all companies with Rewards and Scheduled Recognition.

How it works is simple:

• Create your catalogue with the retailers you want to enable for reward redemption

• Attach it to a Scheduled Recognition and set the award value for budget control and consistency

• Schedule your moments of recognition

We’ll soon add catalogue templates (e.g., Wellbeing, Food & Dining, Tech & Gadgets) to save setup time. Curated Rewards brings:

• For admins: More purposeful, values-aligned recognition and easier budget control

• For employees: Faster access to meaningful reward options, higher satisfaction and reward redemption, and stronger emotional connections to recognition 

Use cases include wellness pushes (exercise gear, healthy foods), productivity drives (headphones, notebooks, home office supplies), and global programs where consistent, scalable catalogues deliver local relevance. Speak to your Client Success Manager to enable Curated Rewards and start building your own reward catalogues.

Improved user profiles

An exciting new focus of ours in 2026 is a journey towards a more social, interactive and engaging employee communications platform, and we have two exciting new updates to share with you today as we embark down this path. 

The first of them is Improved User Profiles that show: 

• Details including bios, contact information, preferred name and more.

• Stats on recognition moments and awards sent and received.

• Team charts so you can see who people work with. 

This is a great way to make your platform more social, help employees find commonalities and connect, and build stronger, better relationships in your workforce. 

Program admins are able to control which fields they want employees to be able to share, but no one will have to share any details they don’t want to share. 

Images in blog comments 

Another feature we’ve just released on our journey to building a more social communications platform is the ability to add images to blog comments. 

Allowing employees to comment with images will make your communications feed much more lively, and it opens up a bunch of exciting new possibilities like threads were employees share their favourite memories, or photo contests where the best submission gets a prize. 

This feature is available to everybody with blogs enabled, and you can choose which blogs you want it enabled or disabled for.

Delivering a global offering 

We now serve 64 countries with 3,700+ merchants. Recent launches include:

• Singapore: 110 Discount and 90 Reward merchants

   

• Malaysia: 80 Discount and 80 Reward merchants

This quarter we’re aiming to expand this global offer with discounts in Indonesia, Philippines, Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, France, Germany, Sweden and Norway.

What's next

Leveraging AI to enhance engagement 

A major innovation we are currently working on for release in the coming months is our brand new AI-powered employee assistant. This will be an AI chatbot that sits inside your program and answers employee questions and provides guidance on how to use your program in a friendly, conversational way. 

Initially, this assistant will help employees with understanding and navigating their engagement program by helping with queries like, “how to I send an eCard?”, ”what travel discounts do I have?” and “where can I find my gift cards?”, which will increase platform utilisation and overall engagement.

This is only the beginning though. Future versions will be able to learn in-depth information about your program and resources and answer more advanced questions and provide guidance about your internal policies and procedures, all while adhering to the strictest information security and data privacy standards.

Alongside the AI Employee Assistant, we will also be rolling out an AI Recognition Companion that help your people draft and refine the perfect eCard, making it easier than ever to send thoughtful, personalised messages without getting put off by writers block or trouble finding the perfect word. 

Insights Builder 

Another exciting innovation coming your way is the new Insights Builder, a major step towards giving you easier and more comprehensive control over all of your program’s data and reporting.

You'll be able to easily create custom reports that contain all the data points that matter to you, easily filter them down into certain employee cohorts, and instantly save and export these reports for further analysis. 

You might want an easy report that shows you the status of all pending award nominations, or a report to see how rewards and recognition are being used in certain teams. These features will help you:

• Understand and optimise your program’s performance

• Maximise utilisation by identifying underperforming areas, such as departments or locations not using their rewards

• Aid your ability to communicate program value to relevant stakeholders 

Admin Portal alerts 

Major improvements to our analytics and reporting aren’t all we’re doing to improve the admin experience, we’ll soon be delivering your admin task notifications to both your SmartHub notifications and a brand new Alerts section within the Admin Portal. 

We’ll also be sending notifications when your R&R balance falls below the notification threshold configured in your settings, as well as when an award fails to send due to insufficient funds. This means it’s easier than ever to keep on top of your award pots and ensure that a lack of visibility never causes a well-deserved reward to slip through the cracks.

Shared nomination limits 

Alerts for low-balance and failed sends aren’t all we’re doing to make it easier for you to manage your award budgets. We’re also introducing shared nomination limits that make it easier for you to share nomination program budgets across departments, business units, or locations. 

Essentially, you will soon be able to create nomination budget limits for both individuals and designated groups. This means that one particular location or team won’t be able to come in and drain your nominations budget before anyone else has had the chance. This will make life a lot easier for admin and finance teams, and enhance the success of your nomination program across your entire organisation.

Workday partnership 

One of the biggest new horizons we’re exploring this year are more partnerships with the HR platforms you use everyday, and we’re kicking things off with a bang by partnering with Workday to enhance the user experience through automatic user provisioning and recognition sharing. 

User provisioning will allow member data to be sent directly to your Reward Gateway | Edenred platform to create, update, and remove members from your system. This means you can use Workday as your single source of truth for member data and have it automatically flow into your employee engagement platform.  

With recognition sharing, when an employee receives public recognition on their Reward Gateway | Edenred platform, you can choose to automatically send it to Workday with employee consent. This means improved data consistency, better reporting, lower compliance risk, and reduction in manual data inputs.

Single app delivery: The Engage app 

This year we are launching the brand new Engage app, which will provide a centralised home for all your:  

• Discounts and benefits 

• Recognition programs 

• Employee rewards 

• Internal communications 

• Wellbeing content 

• Engagement surveys 

• Employee hubs  

Plus, it will also have a ton of brand new exciting features including: 

• A more social employee communications experience.

• A new Goals & Challenges module that allows you to motivate your people and drive exceptional habits

• AI-powered assistants and recognition coaches inside the app

• A mobile-first gifting hub

• Mobile-first surveys 

And most excitingly, custom branding inside the app! We know how important it is for your employee engagement platform to reflect your brand, not ours. That’s why we’re bringing custom branding, personalised themes, and your unique SmartHub to life in the Engage app. 

Beta testing has already provided us some outstanding results with the retention rate of users trying the single app experience up 42% from the previous app version. Conversion rate in the store is higher, and over 65% of surveyed users say that the single app loads faster and is easier to navigate and interact with when compared to the previous version of the app, so we’re so excited to get it into everyone’s hands.

The next phase is kicking off in early April, where the SmartSpending app will evolve into the “Engage” app. This will initially be an improved app for all your employee discounts, but it will quickly evolve into an all-in-one home for every component of your employee engagement platform in July 2026.

As we wrap up this Summer Product Update, our direction is simple and consistent: make work more rewarding by elevating the employee experience, simplifying admin, and unlocking what’s next.

From the Wellbeing Centre and Curated Rewards to richer profiles and livelier blog conversations, you can start creating more personal, social and meaningful moments today. And with AI assistants, the new Insights Builder, smarter admin alerts and a Workday integration on the way, culminating in Engage becoming your single app, we’re building the infrastructure to help you deliver impact at scale.

Speak to one of our employee engagement experts today to see how we can help support you and your workforce in achieving its people and business goals in 2026 and beyond!