Weve lines up mobile loyalty app for retailers
Weve is developing a mobile loyalty app that will give users a single point of access to their various store cards on their phones, according to its marketing director Tony Moretta.
The app is scheduled to launch in beta later this year with a number of “high profile retailers” already signed up to the service ahead of it being made available to Weve’s 17 million-plus mobile users in 2014.
The revelations were made today (18 July) by Moretta addressing digital firms at an event in London.
“There’s lots of loyalty apps out there but only four per cent of them [consumers] use them,” he said, adding that its research indicated 53 per cent of consumers wanted such a service on their phones.
“We see it about taking the eight things you access most in your life and putting them on your phone,” said Moretta explaining the ethos of Weve, a joint m-commerce venture set up by EE, O2 and Vodafone UK.
Elsewhere he explained that Weve also harboured ambitions of launching mobile payments systems by essentially getting consumers to upload their payment card details on to their mobile phones that can then make payments via NFC technology.
This includes using Oyster card payments – which will work even when the phone’s battery expires – on London’s public transport network.
Moretta also said the launch of Google Wallet in the US has thus far stalled due to it requiring consumers to sign up to a new card, plus its terms and conditions to banks were too severe for them to give it any major backing.
“If you look at Google Wallet in the US, it has failed because it asked people to get a new card, plus its offer to the banks wasn’t very good,” he told attendees.
“Or you can go with the aggregation model [which essentially is what Weve is doing]. There’s a lot of talk about ‘who will own the digital wallet?’ but we believe the consumer will decide.”
