Mobile shopping development leaps ahead with new Accolades system

14 Jan 2015

The Nedbank Accolades system is the evolution of mobile shopping, powered by beacon and smartphone app technology. It is a mobile platform that connects the retailer to the customer through proximity-based services and facilitates a seamless, secure card-based mobile payments experience in store. The app provides the product list or menu of the participating store, letting the customer select the product and quantity and check it out of their mobile shopping cart without queues.

Mobile shopping development leaps ahead with new Accolades system

Ovations and Nedbank are continuing to test the Accolades beacon technology in-house at Europa Express at the Nedbank headquarters on 135 Rivonia Road, after which they will assess its application in the retail space.

Evolution of PocketPOS

Chris Wood, Head of Emerging Payments at Nedbank, reveals that PocketPOS, which was the first fully, certified EMV chip & pin mobile point-of-sale (POS) solution in Africa, served as precursor towards the journey of Accolades.

"When Nedbank began innovating in mobile POS technology, it required a neutral party to help it manage the often challenging internal stakeholder relationships and Ovations became the project partner in the process. After the success of the PocketPOS project, the bank began looking at how mobile payments could be expanded to work in the retail and consumer space. It was during this time that beacon technology surfaced and it started to look at how it could leverage off the convergence between the mobile POS and the location based services technology. The Accolades application is a proof of concept that it is supporting to better understand the crossroads of beacons, mobile payments and data analytics."

Craig Leppan, Associate Director at Ovations, believes there is a desire for innovation from merchants and customers, which also adds significance to both parties. This is where Accolades fills the gap, as it is not only technologically advanced, but also relevant.

"There are numerous other mobile payment solutions out there, but we wanted to create something that adds value to all parts of the payments ecosystem, not just to the merchant or just to the customer. From a merchant perspective, Accolades offers new insight into mobile consumer behaviour through the collection of a host of new data points. Through the app, retailers and brands will be able to understand and analyse consumer browsing and buying habits; therefore, being better positioned to offer them relevant products.