Digital Money Forum

Contactless front line

[Dave Birch] You may have noticed the announcement of a new contactless purse/loyalty scheme in the UK.

UK coffee chain Coffee Republic has teamed up with electronic money operator sQuidcard to launch the Coffee Republic contactless prepaid 'Payment and Loyalty' card.

[From The Paypers. Insights in payments.]

I asked Forum friend Adam Smith at sQuidcard for a card and he was kind enough to send me one. I logged on to their web site, registered, loaded a tenner and looked forward to my first contactless loyalty experience.

I could imagine using this

[Dave Birch] There's been a rash of announcements of new payment schemes recently, many of them centred on mobiles. I find myself reading some of these announcements and thinking "well, that sounds neat" but then saying to myself "I couldn't see me using it". There's a disconnect. But some of them I could see myself using. For example, Pay By Touch have developed a Reward and Gift Card Kiosk. The Internet-enabled kiosk lets shoppers create customized store-branded and third-party gift cards with personalized “to” and “from” names and single or multiple design full-color graphics. Gift cards can be purchased and dispensed directly from the self-serve kiosk, eliminating the current requirement of purchasing gift cards at the check-out lane or customer service counter. The kiosks store an unlimited number of graphics, so multiple merchants or brands can be supported on a single kiosk. Here’s how it works:

1. Using a touch-screen, the shopper chooses from multiple designs to match the gift-giving occasion, and chooses the denomination he or she prefers.
2. The shopper then types in both the recipient's and the gift giver’s name (likely her own) into the "to" and “from” fields.
3. Using a credit card, the shopper purchases the gift card directly through the kiosk. The shopper presses “print” and a personalized, activated gift card is printed in seconds, along with a receipt.

Technorati Tags: loyalty, p2p, payments

Payments and loyalty

[Dave Birch] I was in a meeting that touched on loyalty and payments today.  It reminded me that the Wise Marketer had a story about payments and loyalty report that readers might find interesting.  The report, called Making Loyalty Pay: The Relationship Between Rewards and Payments, talks about new models for loyalty with their roots in the web, mobile, biometrics and other technologies. It's very positive about them, saying that they have the potential to boost revenues for merchants, technology providers and payment providers alike, while also minimising the issuer payment revenue cannibalisation. Judging from the priorities of some of our clients, I would say that this bullish perspective is probably correct. As Aneace often points out, while banks (in particular) have yet to really take advantage of the migration to chip, the retailers are looking to banks to deliver more value and better loyalty and rewards platforms seems to be a reasonable way to create that value.  Contactless, for example, should mean that customers are using cards in places where they used to use cash and so loyalty schemes had to be often-forgotten bits of cardboard and the like.  With the chip, they can be automated.

Technorati Tags: payments