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STS was delighted to win our first European Retail Solutions Award this year in conjunction with IBM customer, The Co-Operative Group. This award, for Best Customer Facing Technology, highlighted the original goals for STS, providing a solution which goes beyond chip and PIN.

Congratulations also must go to Whitbread for winning one of the major awards of the night, Innovative Company of the Year. Whitbread were nominated in multiple categories, including for Best Payment Solution Award with STS, IBM, Fidelity and VeriFone. We take the opportunity to have a look at how Whitbread's unique requirements were solved by its business partners. Read more...

   
1. Retail Solutions Awards
2. Whitbread Case Study
3. Support for new PIN pads
4. ITWell Mobile EPOS
5. Ollie's world - Update on contactless payments
 

When STS delivered its award winning Emvelink and SmartNS solution to retailers, it offered not only the ability to perform chip and PIN transactions but also the flexibility of adding new smart card applications or using these new PIN pads for other applications. This extensible framework has been evident through the additional use of applications such as loyalty and gift cards and the ease of access to new devices such as mobile EPOS using STS' Emvelink Mobile or contactless using Touchlink.

The Co-Operative Group's re-use of Ingenico's i3300 PIN pads for customer surveys is a fantastic example of this re-use using STS' SmartNS framework. This simple, yet innovative and creative solution, won this years European Retail Solutions Award for Best Customer Facing Technology.

We have reviewed the solution in last year's newsletter however it is worth remembering some of the key points from this award winning work completed by the Co-Operative Group:

  • Savings of up to £1.2 million per annum
  • Gathers 250,000 in-store customer responses in 24 hours
  • Cuts out third party supplier costs
  • Manages the survey process from a single, central location
  • Ability to tailor questions daily to target entire regions or specific customers
  • Use feedback to enhance customer service, store layouts and marketing campaign effectiveness
  • Utilises existing EMV infrastructure

STS would like to congratulate the Co-Operative Group on this fantastic re-use of the SmartNS framework and thank partners IBM and Ingenico for this solution.