Saving card, Credit card, E Card, Trading Card, Cash Card, Cheque Card… Not fun at all… Each time, I open my wallet, my head is big… at least 2 minutes, to figure out which card I need to pick up…
By adopting electronic means of payment, retailers seek to increase customer retention as well as to secure payments. Traditionally, this fidelity is obtained by promotional offers, permanent or temporary rebates, or points, given in proportion to consumption, that provide discounts for new purchases. Thus, the usage of accreditation or merchant cards in commerce did not initially have a universal scope. With the decentralization of banking services, however, banks have been looking for new points of access to the banking network, while merchants have been seeking ways to enrich their private cards with financial features. This is the reason the point-ofsale terminals (POST) or the cash registers of some stores also may function as ATMs by ensuring the connection to the banking network. The collection system must have a POST that integrates the monetary functions for payment by cash, cards, or checks (query of blacklists, authorization requests, transmission of payment data) with the traditional function of cash registers, for example:
Reading of the optical code on the article to identify it and to determine the price in an electronic file
- Tracking of sales activity to make the link with the store inventory
- Tracking of sellers and cashiers
This explains why supermarket chains Tesco and Sainsbury’s in the U.K. are participating with the Royal Bank of Scotland to unite commercial transactions with financial services. The combined service integrates grocery shopping with banking and allows the discharging of purchases and cash withdrawal from and deposit to bank accounts from the supermarket cash register, in addition to cross-linking the fidelity programs of both. This configuration is similar in several respects to the partnerships established in France between the big department stores and the institutions for consumer credit, for example, the offers by the Cofinoga, Aurore, or Cofidis cards.
EPC (Every Penny Counts, Inc.) is the U.S. incarnation of the same principle. Founded in New Jersey, EPC proposes an electronic “piggy bank” to save the change returned at the cashier’s register. The collected amounts are deposited in a bank account that EPC manages. Each participant is able to request a reimbursement either in cash or additional services, for example, as donations to a charity of choice. Another variation, called AutoGive, operates on the principle of an automatic donation of 2% on all purchases that EPC cardholders make at the regular price. EPC collects the rebates, and the accumulated amounts are then transferred, after deducting a commission, to the bank account of the organization the cardholder designated. However, it is the account manager (EPC) that collects the interest on the amounts stored in the bank while the merchants receive a commission of 3% of the amounts deposited from their cash registers.
Finally, because EPC is integrated to the point-of-sale system of the merchant, it can position itself as an outsourcing service to process the fidelity programs of supermarkets. The risks that the buyer entails are mostly at the level of privacy protection, given that all grocery purchases will be documented in computer databases and connected to the user’s identity.
EPC owns a patent on the computerization of the collection and recording of contributions from payments at the cashier register.
