Linque: Accelerated Checkout Without the Data Trade-Off

The obsession of every merchant is getting the shopper to the checkout page. Far fewer ask what happens when they get there—and why so many of them are leaving.

The answer, more often than not, isn't price. It's friction. Specifically, the moment a guest user hits a blank form and has to find their wallet, type in a 16-digit card number, then verify a billing address.

For a returning customer who's bought from you before, that experience feels broken. For a new one, it's a reason to close the tab.

That's the problem Linque, a new product from Basis Theory to give merchants the conversion lift of accelerated checkout, solves without ceding ownership of their customer data.

What Linque Does 

Linque is a payment method discovery product built by Basis Theory. It finds a customer's existing Visa, Mastercard, or American Express cards using just their phone number and adds them to checkout using only their CVV.

The checkout flow becomes: enter phone → pick a card → enter CVV → authorization.

No account creation. No re-entering card numbers. No hunting for a physical card. For approximately 80% of U.S. consumers, Linque can surface an existing, verified payment method before they have a chance to drop off.

The accelerated checkout category isn't new. Shop Pay, Stripe Link, and PayPal FastLane have demonstrated that simplifying card entry produces real, measurable conversion lifts. That's not in dispute. What is in dispute is who benefits from those lifts and who owns the data afterward.

Every major accelerated checkout product on the market operates on the same model: a closed ecosystem. When a customer checks out through Shop Pay, that transaction flows through Shopify's infrastructure. When they use Stripe Link, Stripe acts as an intermediary. The merchant gets the conversion, but the customer data lives in someone else's vault and that vault is shared with every other merchant on the platform, including your competitors.

Linque is different. It's processor-agnostic, integrates directly with a merchant's existing payment vault, and requires no changes to the underlying payment stack. When a customer checks out through Linque, the merchant receives either a raw primary account number (PAN) or a processor token, at the merchant's choice. The data stays in their vault. No third-party intermediates subsequent transactions. No ecosystem lock-in.

The conversion lift is the same. The data ownership is entirely different.

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How It Works 

Linque offers two integration modes depending on where it fits in a merchant's existing flow.

• Inline Wallet Flow: The customer enters their name and phone number, confirms via SMS one-time passcode (OTP), selects from their available cards, and enters their CVV. The merchant receives a verified PAN or token, along with billing address data. The entire flow replaces a traditional card entry form.
• Asynchronous Pre-Load: For merchants who already have a customer's verified phone number on file, Linque can pre-load eligible cards in the background before checkout begins. The customer arrives at payment already seeing their cards. Checkout becomes: choose a card → enter CVV → done.

Both modes preserve the merchant's direct processor relationship. Linque handles discovery and verification. Everything downstream stays exactly as it is today.

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Who Linque Is For 

Linque is most valuable for merchants where checkout conversion and payment continuity directly affect revenue.

• E-commerce and retail merchants dealing with guest checkout drop-off. If a meaningful percentage of your traffic is first-time or infrequent buyers, eliminating manual card entry is one of the highest-leverage improvements available.
• Subscription and recurring billing businesses where first-payment success and backup card coverage determine whether a customer stays. Linque surfaces card health signals, including available credit and account standing, before a charge fails, giving teams the signal they need to intervene proactively rather than reactively chase recoveries.
• Platforms and VSaaS companies that process transactions on behalf of customers and need a checkout acceleration layer that doesn't hand their customer data to a competitor's network.

The accelerated checkout market has a consolidation problem. Every incumbent solution solves the checkout friction problem by routing merchants through a proprietary network, which means the more merchants adopt it, the more customer data concentrates in fewer hands.

Linque takes the opposite position:

• No ecosystem lock-in. Linque integrates with a merchant's existing vault and processors. There's no requirement to run subsequent transactions through a third-party network to maintain access to the feature.
• Raw PAN access. Most accelerated checkout solutions return a network token tied to their platform. Linque can return a raw PAN, giving merchants full portability and flexibility in how they route and store payment data.
• Your data stays yours. When a customer checks out through Shop Pay or a comparable closed wallet, their data is visible across the broader platform ecosystem. With Linque, the data lives in the merchant's vault, shared with no one.
• Broad coverage. Linque covers approximately 80% of U.S. consumers across Visa, Mastercard, and American Express. Coverage matters when the value of the product depends on being able to surface a card for the customer standing in front of you.

The question for merchants isn't whether to offer an accelerated checkout, but how their version of an accelerated checkout can still preserve their relationships, data, and optionality.

Linque was built for merchants who want the conversion lift without the trade-offs that come with closed-wallet ecosystems. Keep your processor relationships. Keep your customer data. Keep control of your stack.

Ready to see Linque in action? Contact our team and we'll map it to your current checkout flow, no stack changes required.

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