ICICI Bank announce the release of their Tap N Pay payment technology

A recent announcement in the prepaid payment technology world was that ICICI Bank, India’s largest private sector bank, have collaborated with Tech Mahindra Limited, to launch a contactless payment service that is based on the Near Field Communications (NFC) technology. This innovative new payment service which has been named ‘Tap n Pay’ will allow anyone, including non-ICICI Bank account holders to make over the counter purchases, reducing dependency on cash.

The customer will be able to use their NFC enabled mobile phone at the merchant’s point of sale device to make payments. The new innovation is a pre-paid account that allows customers from any bank to register for it and can transfer money online from any account. Customers are also able to top up their ‘Tap n Pay’ accounts by sending an SMS.

Tech Mahindra managing director and chief executive CP Gurnani stated that “The synergies between the two partners (ICICI Bank and Tech Mahindra) will bring about a new payments ecosystem, parallel to, and yet in harmony with, the existing payment networks in the country,".

The service is currently a closed end service and not a universal payment method. The announcement stated that at the moment the new technology is only for large campuses at corporate offices. For example being used at canteens or to buy meal coupons. To me this is advantageous using it less as a universal card but for certain purposes at the start and then maybe expanding. An issue that can come around with universal tap like payment systems can be unwittingly paying for things you didn’t want to.

This was a problem in London, England. The London Underground has a barrier system were the majority of users swipe their Oyster card which has a set amount on, to get through. However, people often kept the Oyster card in their wallet to swipe and their wallet often already had a tap payment card; this meant that money would sometimes be debited off that card whilst trying to swipe through the barriers. This became a serious problem and announcements were having to be made on the Tannoy public speaker systems to warn customers.

This announcement shows the ongoing advances being made in the prepaid payments industry that seeks to increase payment efficiency and to many, signals the lack of need for physical cash. The increase in these types of innovation, many also believe could mean a lack of dependency in banks. Banks will have to come up with innovations of their own to help keep up with the changing times.

About the Author: Harry Kempe, a marketing intern at IIR USA, who works on various aspects of the industry including social media, marketing analysis and media. He is a recent graduate of Newcastle University who previously worked for EMAP Ltd. and WGSN as a marketing assistant on events such as the World Architecture Festival, World Retail Congress and Global Fashion Awards. He can be reached at hkempe@IIRUSA.com

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Speed & Simplicity - The Key for Social Shoppers

Omnichannel retail strategies have been much on the thoughts of retailers over the last couple of years because of an increased focus on ‘social shopping’. Omnichannel strategies aim to create a seamless consumer experience across different platforms. One of the platforms that is being utilised more often is social media. Social shopping refers to consumers who use social media spaces to share coupons, reviews, purchases and more in order to help with their own and others’ future retail experiences.

Recent apps such as Like2Buy combine the huge popularity of social media with a purchase platform. Like2Buy is now incorporated with many companies’ Instagram accounts which allows users to click on a picture that they like which will take them immediately to the brand page for purchasing. With Instagram getting more than 75 million users daily, it could be a huge source of revenue. Getting a seamless transition from picture to buying is vital. Being on a social media site also allows consumers to see the popularity of the product. Instagram allows users to like pictures and seeing that a product is popular will go a long way for persuading a customer to buy.

This quick link between picture and purchase shows the drive to create faster links and an easier experience for consumers. Social shoppers are notoriously impatient; slow websites and longwinded routes to purchase often means a higher probability that the customer will click off site and may in the future go elsewhere.

A survey carried out by Compuware showed that social media shoppers are influenced greatly by the speed and efficiency of online retail platforms. Around a third of survey participants expect a retail website to load in two seconds when using tablets, 24% expected loading in one second and 13% expect loading in less than a second. Obviously there is quite a large dependency on how good of a signal there is but it also shows the fickle nature of social shoppers. These statistics show how important navigation of an online retail platform is. Allowing users to move easily and quickly throughout different areas of a site can go a long way to retail customers. 46% of customers are more likely to go to a competitor’s website if they have a bad experience on a website.

Catering to the needs of social shoppers and boosting omnichannel retail strategies could really help to boost retail sales. The majority of social shoppers are millennials between aged 18-24; this generation of consumers have grown up with the internet and expect more now from online retail. With the wealth of information available, online retailers should use this to their advantage and put social shopping as a priority for the future of their omnichannel retail strategies.

About the Author: Harry Kempe, a marketing intern at IIR USA, who works on various aspects of the industry including social media, marketing analysis and media. He is a recent graduate of Newcastle University who previously worked for EMAP Ltd. and WGSN as a marketing assistant on events such as the World Architecture Festival, World Retail Congress and Global Fashion Awards. He can be reached at hkempe@IIRUSA.com

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Last Chance to Save for APEX Europe is Friday!

 LAST CHANCE TO SAVE ON YOUR APEX EUROPE REGISTRATION!

All Payments Expo Europe is designed for you to meet with industry peers to analyse the impacts of new technology, regulation and new players in the payments and retail landscape. By attending, you will hear new insights from leading players, best position yourself among competition and your improve business relationships with clients and partners.

Access 8+ hours of unique networking opportunities, including:

Private Executive Boardroom Sessions: Capped at 20 participants, these sessions are off-the-record and limited to senior-level executives. These are discussion driven, private discussions focused on the biggest opportunities and challenges facing the prepaid and retail sectors.

Match-Making Lunch: Looking to meet a particular type of attendee? We'll help you set up lunch dates to stimulate deal flow and collaborate with new businesses. E-mail Diana Middleton at dmiddleton@iirusa.com for more details.

Two Evening Receptions: Some of the best conversations happen after the sessions conclude. Receptions include a welcome party a Guey Marbella and a White Party at La Sala By the Sea.

View the Agenda

Register by Friday 17 April and save €200! Use the code XU2940BLOG

I hope to see you in Marbella this May.

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Will Cashless Payments Cause Us to Spend More?

Contactless payment is widely regarded by many as the future of payments. Many believe that technology such as the Card Case app or Apple Pay will start to dominate the payments world as they are easy and fast forms of payments. In some cases you may not even need a wallet anymore.

Businesses are looking increasingly at giving customers the easiest possible experience in terms of their consumer journey. They want to make sure that at the end of the journey the customer doesn’t have to struggle to part with their hard earned money by waiting in long queues or wondering which credit card has the most on. Many believe it is in the best interests of the customer to be able to swipe something quickly and walk out with your new purchase. However, as easy and convenient as it is, could it mean increased spending for us on a day to day basis?

New research has shown that many people, especially the millennial generation, find that paying with cash is an easier way to not spend as much money. Personally, as someone who is fresh out of University, with student debts and an apartment in a foreign country, I am trying very hard to make every dollar count. This means taking out a certain amount of money in cash at the start of each week and saying to myself, I will spend this much and no more. It is a very simple budgeting technique used by many; however contactless payment threatens it. Waving a phone over a scanner or quickly swiping a card, to me and I’m sure to many others, does not really feel like you are parting with money as it does with cash.

More convenient payment systems will mean even if you have no cash, a consumer will simply spend little bits here and there, especially with credit. Obviously internet statements are a good way of keeping track every now and again but that will not stop when you want that desert at a restaurant instead of having a cash limit.

So much of the excitement surrounding the rise of contactless payments is focused on how much it is for the customer without looking so closely about the benefits for businesses. An interesting development for me would be a form of inbuilt budgeting system within the app or form of payment. As contactless payment develops, as does the internet of things, meaning more interconnection. This could mean a weekly budget for those millennials trying hard to make the pennies count that is on a payment app which is connected to a calendar which may warn of upcoming events that could stop you getting that pair of jeans that may not strictly be necessary. In a world where businesses need to increasingly think about the consumer’s experience, helping them with little things like that could ultimately mean the difference between gaining or losing a customer.

About the Author: Harry Kempe, a marketing intern at IIR USA, who works on various aspects of the industry including social media, marketing analysis and media. He is a recent graduate of Newcastle University who previously worked for EMAP Ltd. and WGSN as a marketing assistant on events such as the World Architecture Festival, World Retail Congress and Global Fashion Awards. He can be reached at hkempe@IIRUSA.com

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Big Data and Omnichannel Retail Analytics

Big data analytics are revolutionizing the shopping experience and the way retail organizations engage their customers. With the array of shopping channels available to the modern consumer - including in-store, online, mobile and membership platforms – retail organizations generate and have access to a wealth of underutilized data. By leveraging open source big data technologies, retailers can turn this data into actionable insights on buying behavior and customer 360 view.

The legacy relational database – long the enterprise workhorse for storing and processing data – is being challenged by an explosion of data generated by internet, mobile and cloud applications. Not only is more data being generated, it is being generated by more sources - social, geo, sensor, machine, network (The Internet of Things), to name a few.

Open source big data tools such as Hadoop and NoSQL enable businesses to become more agile and create value from their data by being able to process, store and analyze large volumes of data from disparate sources. Legacy systems were not designed to handle fast-growing volumes of structured, unstructured and semi-structured data in a cost effective manner. With its parallel processing and cost effective scalability, Hadoop provides businesses with greater flexibility on how they can use data.

The journey to becoming an agile business leveraging big data analytics for greater customer insights is filled with many challenges. Ankur Gupta, Sr. Director of Big Data at Sears Holdings Corporation, shares insights into overcoming these challenges at All Payments Expo Europe this May. In addition to sharing lessons learned, Ankur will discuss several key big data analytics use cases that are essential for a successful omnichannel retail strategy.

Smart Network Analytics for In-Store Customer Insights
Hadoop can be used to store, extract and transform data from network devices (IoT) for use by various business users to generate value for the organization. The ability to perform analytics and continuous reporting on this network data in-house is a big cost saver and delivers added business intelligence capabilities, such gaining insight into customer mobile device usage within guest networks.

Fraud Detection for Loyalty Rewards Program
Using big data tools, organizations can develop an intelligent system that learns from customer online behavior to determine if the customer could be a fraudulent user. By applying machine learning techniques on sets of historical data that have already been defined as legitimate or fraudulent, the system “learns” as the user generates new data. Using parameters of fraudulent use, the system determines if the data is legitimate or if the user is tampering with the data to “game the system” to earn points.

Sentiment Analysis using Social Media Data
Using Hadoop, marketers can gain insight to the perception of their products and brands, such as hashtags used, number of mentions, time of day people are mentioning, tone or any other statistic the business user is looking to discover. Furthermore, marketers can gain unparalleled insight into sentiment about the quality and services of their products; whether those sentiments are positive, negative or neutral. Social media analytics allows business users to see the detail of the overall view of what is being discussed about their product or brand, or those of their competitors.

While there are proprietary tools in the market that give businesses similar analytics capabilities, these tools typically carry a hefty price tag and lack the scalability and flexibility of open source tools. Data is growing and changing faster than ever. By leveraging open source platforms, businesses can build analytics solutions that can easily scale with their data, are flexible to meet new business requirements and avoid vendor lock-in to reduce long term costs.

Ankur Gupta

About the Speaker
As a Senior Director of Big Data at Sears Holdings Corporation and GM of MetaScale, a subsidiary of Sears, Ankur spearheads a team that has expertise in building, deploying and managing enterprise-scale big data platforms for a variety of customer analytics initiatives. An Engineer from Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee and MBA from Duke University, Ankur uses his knowledge and skills to manage big data projects for organizations focused on seamlessly connecting digital and physical customer experiences.


Your customers expect a modern shopping experience…are you equipped with the tools and technology needed to provide one? Join Ankur Gupta for his Big Data and Omnichannel Retail Analytics Keynote Address at All Payments Expo Europe. Be sure to register by Friday 17 April to save €200! Just use the code XU2940BLOG.

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See Who's Attending APEX Europe

All Payments Expo Europe, the most relevant B2B payments and retail gathering in Europe, is shaping up to be the most relevant international community for prepaid, technology and merchants. This is where executives will hear all-new, peer-led case studies and insights AND get access to brand new consumer research.

Attracting attendees from 25+ countries, APEX Europe is where retail, mobile, data and technology intersect to grow connected commerce over the course of 3 days, 8+ hours of devoted networking and private, off-the-record sessions.

Here’s a sample of who you’ll get to meet while in Marbella:
3V Transaction Services • Airplus International SRL • Al Fardan Exchange • Alma D • ArbitorSports • Auctionata • Bankable • CardOneBanking • Cardwise • Carta Financial Services Ltd • Centigo AB • Coop Danmark • Dansk Supermarked A/S • Edgar Dunn & Company • eNett International • ePayService • Epipoli SpA • EuroCommerce • First Data • Flex e-card • FlexCard • Flex-e-Vouchers • Gap Inc •     Gemalto SA • Genesys • GKFX • Globoforce • Gruppo Poste Italiane • Gx • Hobbs Limited • Home Retail Group • Hotel Voucher Shop • IMA • Iqcard LLC •  John Lewis Partnership • Limonetik • Load & Go • Localz •Locke Lord • Marks & Spencer • Mercator Advisory Group •        MintCombine • MTACC Inc • Nordic Choice • Optimal Payments • Orwell • Payment Card Solutions • Payoneer EU Limited • PerfectCard • PMA Media Group • Polymath Consulting • PPRO • PSI-Pay Ltd • Raphaels Bank • Rapid Financial Solutions • Rideau Recognition Solutions • Riverbridge Partners LLC • Sears Holdings Corporation •Signet • Smart Concepts BV • TESCO Bank • Thames Card Technology Ltd • The Billing Project LLC • Ticket Surf • TJX Europe • TrustEu Affairs • TrustPay a s • Tuxedo Money Solutions • WEX Europe Ltd. • Yandex Money •Zalando SE

View Agenda | Speaker Faculty | Register

To join these peers and potential partners, sign up here. Register by 17 April to save up to €200! Use the code XU2940BLOG to save.

I look forward to seeing you in Marbella this coming May.

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Are Chipotle Leading the Way with Retail Incentives?

Gifting incentives in the retail industry are fast becoming standard practice throughout different brands and retailers. Loyal customers are rewarded for their allegiance to the brand with incentives such as ‘buy 9 and get the tenth free’. In hindsight when the free purchase is reached, it is just a 10% discount for each purchase and for me a scheme like that won’t make me desperate to get to my 10th purchase. So then what really can be deemed as a real incentive for the customer? Chipotle reward their customers in a completely different manner to most.

Chipotle as a brand are known for their powerful marketing campaigns that reach out to consumers in order to educate the customer on issues in farming. Chipotle’s ethos and values were imprinted in their adverts that drew attention to farm animals being injected with hormones and unethical, inhumane farming practices that are cruel to the animals. Chipotle want to educate their customers and enlighten them to these issues and thus reward them for their learning.

At first I was skeptical. My first thought was how can a customer prove they have learnt about the issues whilst trying to get their reward? However, Chipotle have ways of letting customers show they are engaging with their values. For example recently they had a promotion that let customers purchase a tofu burrito and that would allow them to use the receipt of purchase for a free purchase at a later stage. This helps push Chipotle’s belief that tofu can be as good as pork, chicken or beef. Another huge reward scheme is their interactive Scarecrow game.

Photo Credit: Ken Wolter / Shutterstock

Chipotle started their education through their advertising campaigns which included slogans such as ‘‘we’re anti-antibiotics (but pro-chicken)’, but then shortly after took the world by storm with short videos such as ‘Back to the Start’ and ‘Scarecrow’. Scarecrow comes with a game that encourages sustainable farming and gaining points in it wins the player Chipotle products. By gaining points shows customers engaging with the Chipotle values embedded in the game regarding unsustainable farming issues. Another game scheme they have is ‘Farm Team’ that again teaches customers where Chipotle’s produce comes from and educates them on sustainable farming.

In the near future will other companies use a different approach in rewarding their customers that goes against the usual rewards, such as getting a thousand subpoints and get a free subway? Ultimately will educating consumers be more of an incentive than buying a certain number of products and getting a free one at the end?

Personally I think the majority of consumers will prefer to feel that they may be helping a bigger issue. I believe major brands could incorporate educational retail rewards and incentives into schemes they may have already. I believe promoting sustainable practices could boost customer loyalty in many fields. Clothes outlets could promote issues such as sweatshop labour and coffee shops could help to promote fair trade coffee. I think incentives through rewards are a very clever ploy and should be incorporated more in the retail world.

About the Author: Harry Kempe, a marketing intern at IIR USA, who works on various aspects of the industry including social media, marketing analysis and media. He is a recent graduate of Newcastle University who previously worked for EMAP Ltd. and WGSN as a marketing assistant on events such as the World Architecture Festival, World Retail Congress and Global Fashion Awards. He can be reached at hkempe@IIRUSA.com

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