Financial Institutions
Voucher Currencies are more rewarding than points and cashback. Cardholders collect payment card linked Voucher Currency distributed by Retailers, or participating reward programmes.
Last updated
Voucher Currencies are more rewarding than points and cashback. Cardholders collect payment card linked Voucher Currency distributed by Retailers, or participating reward programmes.
Last updated
We live in a world where every commercial transaction requires that a third party exists in order to validate it. As a result, acquiring banks, card schemes, Payment Service Providers, Payment Gateways and processors, collectively, have oversight of every single electronic payment made at their connected Retailers.
These companies are usually large and regulated with a business model of charging their connected Retailers a small percentage of every transaction. As competition and regulation in the payments space have increased this small revenue percentage is inevitably heading to zero. As a result, these organisations are looking for new revenue streams and ways to keep themselves relevant as direct P2P and bank to bank payments grab a chunk of their markets.
In the $VOW ecosystem all such financial Institutions can perform the function of transaction verification and benefit in many ways. When a Retailer registers with the $VOW ecosystem, it does so through a Offer Aggregator. The Retailer must provide the Offer Aggregator with logos and images and all its corporate listing data including the Merchant Identifiers for all Financial Institutions it is connected to.
The Offer Aggregator provides those same Merchant Identifiers to a community approved validator (MVD) which has built integrations to those same financial Institutions.
The MVD provides the Offer Aggregator, as well as a growing network of Reward Programmes with an automatic copy of all payments performed by their End Users whenever a pre-registered bank card is used to pay at any registered Retailer. This process means that to participate in the $VOW economy Retailers do not need additional costly hardware, they simply provide their Merchant Identifiers, and they are good to go. For this convenience, Offer Aggregators, and MVDs, pay a per transaction fee to financial Institutions for providing Transaction Verification services.
Not only do integrated financial institutions receive direct benefits in the form of additional fees on transactions they are already processing, but indirect benefits too. This is because the $VOW ecosystem incentivizes more payments and larger basket sizes at participating Retailers, which the host financial institution processes. Automatically linked offers helps achieve higher revenues for financial institutions, gives them a competitive advantage in the market, and additionally locks Retailers to their processing network.
MVDs in the $VOW ecosystem are already directly integrated with global financial Institutions such as VISA, Fiserv, Pinelabs, Innoviti, Nets and may more. One of the initial MVDs and integrator of such networks is Enigmatic Smile, a Reward Technology Facilitator based out of the UK. Enigmatic Smile is a PCI Level 1 Service provider, operating at the highest level of compliance in the payments industry. As a result, technical integrations with financial institutions are never thwarted by undue security concerns.
