Ronald Herman, Founder & CEO Loyalty rewards in the form of customized shopping offers or digital currency proportional to customers’ expenditure are common in retail business today. Using the rewards to make payments across any retail store not only motivates repeat customers but also increases retail sales numbers. Working towards enabling this for over 200 million loyalty app users across U.S. is Sionic Mobile, based in Atlanta, GA. “Loyalty for us is what helps consumers the most,” says Ronald Herman, Founder and CEO, Sionic Mobile. The company has a record of deploying seamless mobile payment solutions successfully, enabling customers to pay retailers through loyalty apps of their choice. To achieve this, they have implemented strategic partnerships with several retailers having loyalty apps of their own, integrating their customer data and the loyalty rewards earned by them, with its commerce platform which ‘pushes payments to the back-end’.
At its core, Sionic Mobile is based on a cloud-based ION Commerce Engine™ (ICE) and GeoSense
® Beacon network. Utilizing JP Morgan Chase payment processing, the ICE payment and loyalty platform is easily integrated with popular payment terminals and Point of Sale (PoS) systems, supporting mobile payments from most iOS or Android devices besides bank-issued credit or debit cards. ICE simultaneously maintains two ledgers—one for tracking consumer payments and the other for updating perks and freebies merited by consumers, proportionate to their payments—both integrated at the back-end. For consumers unaware of the exact app containing rewards to make the payment, beacons emit long range signals, welcoming mobile customers with reminders. Short range signals, at a distance of three feet from PoS, automatically launch the appropriate app and generate a 3-digit code on shoppers’ mobiles for making payments, following which the second ledger is immediately updated with rewards. This helps in the faster clearing of queues at stores.
Merchants implementing this solution also become a part of the Mobile Rewards Marketplace™—a cloud-based web and mobile app solution—under which Sionic Mobile has helped several SMB retailers with speedy sign up, low-cost, bulk-rate mobile payments, and merchant controlled rewards.
We create merchant-specific business metrics that help their app and retail partners obtain habitual spending traits of consumers, based on time, day, and geographical data
Mobile Rewards Marketplace allows merchants to enjoy the support of analytics at no additional cost. “We create merchant-specific business metrics that help their app and retail partners obtain habitual spending traits of consumers, based on time, day, and geographical data,” notes Herman. This information is shared with retailers to individualize rewards, savings, and perks to each consumer, depending on their spending patterns, which Herman opines, lowers the gap between retailers and shoppers.
In its aim to bring retailers and consumers closer, Sionic Mobile has ventured into futuristic designs, as well. For General Motors, Sionic Mobile is working towards turning infotainment screens of cars into potential touch points of commerce. It involves enabling consumers to tap on screen icons which would guide them to retail stores based on geographical navigation features and support the payment through General Motors’ account and earn more rewards. “Configuring infotainment screens as touch points for retail shopping, takes mobile commerce far beyond hand-held devices,” states Herman.
Forging ahead, Sionic Mobile intends to reach out to the international mobile commerce market, as a part of bridging the gap between consumers and retailers. Hence, the company is seeking to partner with more players in financial and retail communities to create new revenue models. Sionic Mobile believes that the best way to future-proof its operations is to strengthen existing relationships. With the right plans in place, the company is all set to occupy the number one position soon.
