Wave your phone, pay the bill, earn your points
Customers in stores and restaurants in Takamatsu City's Symbol Tower will now be able to pay their bills and collect their loyalty points by simply waving their mobile phone at the cash register.
Japanese credit card issuer JCB has teamed up with NTT DoCoMo Shikoku and Symbol Tower Development Corporation to offer QuicPay Mobile contactless payment service at 23 stores and restaurants in Takamatsu City's Symbol Tower. The service is targeted at more than 1,500 office workers in the building, but is available to the general public as well.
QuicPay is a contactless payment solution designed to allow speedy transactions: a purchase can be made in under a second - much quicker than a cash sale. A part of the customer's existing credit limit is assigned to a contactless IC chip, which may be embedded in a plastic card or in a mobile phone handset as in the Takamatsu application. QuicPay purchases are linked to the cardholder's existing JCB credit card account so that users can earn loyalty points on their purchases.
Marketing tools According to Masatoshi Sakamoto, Assistant Vice President, Strategic Market Development Department, JCB in Osaka, "Through QuicPay we can offer our customers not only simple and speedy payment, but also the visual and communication elements that the mobile phone adds. For example, they are able to check their card use history on the phone display at any time."
New marketing tools are being developed for retailers too, including services that merchants can use to have discount coupons e-mailed to the customer's mobile phone, and to have purchase discounts deducted from the customer's JCB credit card bill.
JCB has been testing the QuicPay Mobile payment service since November 2004. The company is currently conducting a trial in the Tokyo metropolitan area in cooperation with cosmetics manufacturer and retailer FANCL Corporation. In addition, Seicomart, a large convenience store chain in Hokkaido, will be implementing a six-month trial of QuicPay between June and November 2005 at ten of its outlets in Sapporo.
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