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A conversation with Scotty Perkins and Jose Luis-Gomes
In today’s highly volatile retail environment, creating value for the consumer right at the point of sale is everything. But brick-and-mortar merchants are at a disadvantage compared to e-commerce retailers when it comes to personalizing customer experiences. They have very limited ability to gain detailed information about the purchasing behaviors of individual consumers.
Quisitive recently launched LedgerPay, a modern, direct payment processing platform that replaces traditional payment processing layers and fees with a cloud-enabled payments and data analytics solution. LedgerPay’s payment tokenization securely taps data from every single customer who used a payment card, making a process that was once a tax now financially lucrative for merchants. But what really sets LedgerPay apart is the focus on using that payments data to provide unique insights into consumer behavior for brick-and-mortar retailers.
LedgerPay recently announced a strategic go-to-market relationship with dunnhumby, a global leader in customer data science. The LedgerPay-dunnhumby offering is a first-of-its-kind service for brick-and-mortar merchants such as quick-serve restaurants (QSRs), grocers, and other retailers who want to encourage repeat and more valuable sales by capitalizing on past purchases at the point of sale (POS). It combines the power of an innovative payment processing platform with tokenization to offer merchants an unprecedented level of precise, secure, and actionable customer data derived from real-time, non-cash POS transaction data.
LedgerPay SVP Scotty Perkins had the chance to sit down with Jose Luis-Gomes, President of North America for dunnhumby, during a discussion with our investor community to talk about our firms’ go-to-market relationship.
Thanks for talking with me today, Jose. Can you give us an overview of dunnhumby?
dunnhumby is the global leader in customer data science, empowering businesses to compete and thrive in the modern data-driven economy. We’re a purpose-driven organization that exists ultimately to help retailers become more customer first. That entails understanding what customers want and need and understanding how they can deliver that better than the competition. With this information, our customers can make decisions that will prioritize those investments in the best way possible.
dunnhumby has always relied on customer data coming from traditionally loyalty programs — we invented this space back in the 90s and continue to be active globally. But we have recently found that the expansion of loyalty programs is limited for many industries. The ability to tokenize transaction payments becomes essential for areas like QSRs and convenience stores where loyalty programs don’t make sense. We see a real opportunity to augment the understanding of what loyalty programs bring and we’re really excited about the ability to do that with a global solution like LedgerPay.
Why is go-to-market relationship with LedgerPay important in the context of how dunnhumby can more broadly support your customers and monetize the data opportunity further?
Like any successful companies we know where our strengths are, and we want to play in those areas. There is a lack of customer data in areas like QSRs, [drug and pharmacy chains], and [dollar stores], which means that we can’t create a longitudinal view of customers. That inhibits a few monetization opportunities:
- The value of the data when you sell it to the manufacturers.
- The ability of any of the media targeting, a tremendous personalization opportunity for retailers.
A large part of dunnhumby’s offering is predicated on our ability to track and communicate with customers. Up to now, large swathes of the market have been off-limits to our offering. Our go-to-market relationship with LedgerPay will allow us to provide retailers with the capability to track customers and to create better strategies for their business. Many of these industries have been traditionally dark. Convenience Stores, for example are the most profitable channels for the package goods companies. Our go-to-market relationship with LedgerPay provides a real opportunity for us to penetrate this market.
As I mentioned before, dunnhumby is also excited about the global reach of this relationship. There are a number of countries where loyalty programs are less evolved, so even in the grocery space this becomes an opportunity.
Can you expand on how LedgerPay and dunnhumby will activate together?
Most of the added value and the benefit is business as usual for dunnhumby. Today, for example, we’ll get feeds from our retail partners that will have some sort of tokenization element whether that’s brought to them by their loyalty program. So the fit with LedgerPay should be seamless and we can switch on 100% of our customer-driven capabilities immediately.
The LedgerPay system will tokenize the payments in real-time and will feed through to dunnhumby. We’ll turn on all of our insight’s platforms, turn on our personalization algorithms, and feed those back either to the retailer or monetize those with their partners.
We’ll explore how to leverage real-time data feeds, which is a tremendous opportunity, particularly if we’re trying to understand things that happen before the shopping trip happens or immediately after the shopping trip is ended and on the receipt. That gives great scale to the retailers into the [consumer packaged goods brands] which is one of the secrets around personalization and one of the failings for the convenience sectors. We’ll be able to plug that data feed into our existing capabilities. Over time we’ll explore what we can do in real-time– a capability that we already leverage extensively in eCommerce. We’ll be able to bring that capability to the brick-and-mortar world which will be a real game-changer.
Is there anything else you’d like to add?
We are excited that the dunnhumby/LedgerPay go-to-market is integrated with execution. We’ve collaborated with other partners with different tokenization capabilities but it’s incredibly expensive today to do this right. Many of our partners shy away from tokenization as they find it’s difficult to break even. The LedgerPay platform, on the other hand, has the unique ability to think about real-time. dunnhumby looks forward to using that perspective as we onboard new partners onto the platform.
The wider dunnhumby family is excited about leveraging our go-to-market relationship in other core markets including Europe, Latin America and Asia Pacific where transaction-based payment systems are much more valuable. Finally, dunnhumby just signed a huge partnership with Microsoft, so the integration with Quisitive has been very beneficial for dunnhumby – closing the loop as we go to retailers and have a broader proposition.
