This platform has been developed to exceed all worldwide payment industry standards.
As a consumer, imagine an easy-to use wallet which can store every card in your wallet – credit, debit, loyalty, prepaid, tickets, hotel keys – everything. Anything with a magstripe or barcode can be digitised and securely placed on the iCache Digital Wallet. At point of sale or online, select what card you would like to use and iCache becomes that card. This is all accomplished without changing anything at point of sale.
As an issuer, imagine the nirvana of digitally guaranteed “top of wallet” positioning, a branded portal that the consumer’s wallet connects to, distributing cards as digital packets and significantly decreasing fraud.
As a retailer, imagine being able to geo-target consumers who have opted in for or are searching for your product or service. You can communicate and deliver offers digitally to the consumer’s wallet for immediate use. For web as well as brick and mortar retailers, you know your transactions are safe with iCache as the payment method is individually bound to the consumer’s fingerprint – all without changing the way you currently process transactions.
The payments landscape is evolving and growing. Over the past 10 years it has experienced double-digit spend and revenue growth, product proliferation and massive industry consolidation. But this growth has been mitigated by diminishing margins, primarily driven by the growing cost of customer acquisition and retention, as well as higher write-offs due to fraudulent activity. Furthermore, the market saturation of traditional payment mechanisms, such as credit and debit cards, has turned these payments into commodities with competitors focusing mainly on share shift.
Overview
The iCache Digital Wallet (IDW) is a small, intelligent portable consumer device that consolidates all the cards in a consumer’s wallet into one single card. The IDW also incorporates contactless payment cards and most barcoded cards or transaction tools, such as loyalty cards, gift cards, coupons, event tickets and airline boarding passes. The consumer manages all the data within the IDW via a computer-based interface similar to iTunes. Critical to the IDW is universal acceptance – it can be used with all the existing Point-of-Sale technology today, requiring no changes by the merchants to accept or process the transaction. The complexity of this solution occurs behind the scenes as the consumer is presented with an easy to use, intuitive device.
The set-up process is simple: consumers receive their IDW in the comfort of their home, connect it to their computer via a USB cable, register their fingerprint with the device, and insert the card data. At that point the IDW is ready for use. Intense security processes prevent the introduction of cards not owned by the IDW owner to be introduced to the IDW. The IDW is used in the same way a legacy form factor (plastic card) would in consumer transactions.
Consumers swipe their finger over the fingerprint reader and upon verification select which card they want to use. The information is then digitally encoded on the single card within the device and the card is ejected for use. In the case of a contactless card, consumers tap the contactless POS terminal with the IDW as they would with their contactless plastic card. For barcodes, the barcode is displayed on the device and can be scanned by the barcode reader.
All data, at the consumer’s discretion, is stored in secure, redundant databases with secure internet access. If the IDW is misplaced or stolen, the data will be rendered inaccessible because of the biometric and database encryption algorithms that are paired to the individual IDW owner. The consumer can download the data to their replacement IDW and have their digital identity restored in a matter of seconds from any computer with internet access. This serves two key purposes – it protects the networks from fraudulent card use in the event of loss or theft, and it protects consumers from the hassle of cancelling their credit card accounts and updating reccurring billing information. Key consumer benefits include enhanced personal security, ease of use and a slimmer wallet. Consumer intercepts performed by a third party organisation revealed an astounding consumer desire for the iCache Digital Wallet, with an 84 percent favourability rating across a wide demographic.
