Ingenico Helps Bridge Gap Between Mobile Payments and Rewards Program

Loyalty programs are the grease for a lot of wheels when it comes to retail. Not only do properly-executed loyalty programs keep shoppers coming back to particular stores, they also have an excellent potential for driving support to mobile payments systems as well. Recently, one new move announced by our friends at Ingenico—who also tipped us off about the event—gives the mobile payments / loyalty program concept a little more connection.

Basically, with the new move, Ingenico has integrated Apple Pay support for loyalty program options into Ingenico’s line of payment tools. This makes anyone who’s offering Apple Pay to customers also able to offer things like gift cards, rewards programs, and other options to customers. Such a move is expected to add new options for customer engagement and improve the overall shopping experience accordingly.

Systems set to benefit from the new move include the Telium TETRA UPP and the Telium 2 RBA system, along with much of the Ingenico platform as a whole. Canada Standalone and Moby customers, meanwhile, are slated to get access to this system by sometime in the first half of 2020.

Ingenico Group North America director of go-to-market strategy Mark Bunney noted “Our integration of Apple Pay support for loyalty programs allows us to modernize and digitize the traditional punch card and facilitate a wide range of next-generation experiences on iPhone across loyalty, gift card, rewards, ticketing and more. This enables merchants to really get sophisticated in driving loyalty, reduce in-store friction and gain a firm understanding of who their customer is and how to best engage with them.”

It’s like we’ve said here before; adding loyalty program support to mobile payments makes it more likely that mobile payments will get used. Why? Simple; people like getting something for nothing, or rather, for something they would have done anyway. That’s a draw. That free 11th sub, haircut, pair of shoes or whatever is a valuable proposition, but its value is tempered by what needs to be done to get it. Some don’t see the value in keeping a card on hand, and regularly updated, for the sake of that freebie.

But if getting that freebie becomes as easy as using a mobile payments tool, well, that’s different.

Only time will tell just how different, though, but Ingenico’s move is likely good enough to draw some interested businesses in to get a new way to reach customers.