Mindtree likes to uproot the status quo.
For more than two decades, the technology consulting and services company has helped global enterprises marry scale with agility to achieve a competitive advantage across industry verticals.
Hence, it comes as no surprise that the billion-dollar giant recently applied their digital expertise to solve institutional pain points in two different industries—the decreasing rate of redemption in loyalty programs in retail and the tedious merchant onboarding process in banking.
“Implementing a solution wasn’t the problem,” says Santanu Mukherjee, senior technical architect at Mindtree. “The challenge was to think of an innovative solution for long-standing issues that have been prevalent in these
Loyalty programs have been on the rise in the retail, hotel, and airline sectors and for good reason: Consumers who adopt a rewards program (and give it a favorable review) are almost 80 percent more likely to continue spending money with the brand.
However, when customers stop participating for the perks, the impact on a brand’s bottom line is huge. Nearly $100 billion worth of points remain unused annually, which translates to missed opportunities to engage consumers and a balance sheet liability when compared to the cost of marketing and maintaining the program.
To help consumers consolidate their rewards programs and to help brands win back customers, Mindtree developed $wap, a blockchain-based loyalty exchange platform in which customers can redeem reward points across providers for goods and services.
Mindtree chose the Ionic framework to build the hybrid mobile app and deployed Hyperledger Fabric technology, which gives companies smart, contract-driven points of exchange, an easy onboarding process into the network, as well as real-time reflections of the earn and burn for loyalty points. With $wap, says Mukherjee. “all the partners who are onboarded can easily reconcile the dollar equivalent of their points systems.”
Partners in any sector—restaurants, retail brands, bookstores—can be dynamically onboarded by $wap administrators. The platform then allows merchants to negotiate exchange rates for points stored on the ledger, but these rates remain transparent only to the members who took part in the agreement. Merchants are connected using one channel with different nodes; each node represents a single organization each consisting of two peers. The endorser for each transaction is the $wap organization, which uses Raft consensus spread across different VMs for endorsing transactions.
As a result, $wap provides maximum flexibility as well as premium features to its users. Customers can pay for goods and services at any of $wap’s vendors with the ability to split up payments using points accumulated over multiple loyalty cards. (Translation: You no longer have to rack up a large number of points to start benefiting from a loyalty program.) $wap can leverage geolocation search to identify nearby vendors that accept reward points and offer intelligent suggestions for which loyalty card to redeem at member brands. The platform also allows customers to manage their various accounts and transactions as well as transfer points to friends or family members—all through one interface.
The bottom line benefits of $wap are clear. Not only can brands continue investing in loyalty programs. They can also build new revenue sharing models among onboarded partners. And if problems arise among customers, $wap allows brands to instantaneously resolve disputes or complaints since the platform’s blockchain technology provides complete traceability of all transactions.