Touchatag, co-pioneer for the electronic meal voucher pilot with Accor-Services

Brussels, 16 April 2010 - Touchatag, an Alcatel-lucent venture, has delivered from day one the technical side of the pilot for the electronic meal vouchers. The employees of Alcatel-Lucent can pay for their sandwiches using their e-voucher, inside their own premises as well as with some local stores in the neighbourhood. On the same card, they can also enjoy additional services such as e-couponing or interactive advertising. The pilot project has turned into a major success.

Together with Accor-Services, touchatag started up the first phase of its pilot project in June 2008, at the Alcatel-Lucent sites in Antwerp and Namur. 250 employees were paying for their lunches with electronic meal vouchers. In the meantime, that number has grown to more than 500 employees, but also additional services delivered by partners such as PingPing (micro payments), ClearChannel (interactive street advertising), fidelity programs (ProximityBBDO) and Concentra.

For all of these pilot projects touchatag delivers the RFID stickers, the readers and especially: the ‘Application Correlation Service’ and the so called ‘wallet’. That’s the ‘heart’ of the technology, which ensures that a simple wireless action (putting the e-voucher on the reader) triggers the right application (payment, receiving coupons,..). In the future this can be expanded with other new services, such as loyalty card functions and interactive marketing.

In the meantime, the touchatag™ technology, designed in the research centers of Alcatel-Lucent Bell in Antwerp, has become the basis of Alcatel-Lucent’s Mobile Wallet Service, the platform for operators and companies anywhere in the world to offer mobile payment services.  Edgar & Dun Company (EDC) predicts that in 2015 more than 1,4 billion people will use their mobile Phone as virtual wallet. In developing countries, this is mostly to offer payment services to the large ‘unbanked’ population, in western economies it is because of the user comfort and the many advantages for marketing and loyalty for retail and other partners.

The additional functions of the e-voucher are illustrated by the complete ecosystem which was set up around the pilot project. The subscriber can make use of interactive advertising boards of Clearchannel, the electronic newspaper stand of Concentra and coupons of RMB. The fact that these possibilities were intensely used, shows that the electronic meal voucher offers a lot more potential than its paper version.

“Electronic meal vouchers are promising applications for ‘virtual’ wallets for payment as well as marketing services” claims Anthony Belpaire of touchatag. “The users like the simplicity and the extra applications which in the past were not feasible on the paper variant.”

 

For more information:

Karsten Lemmens

Media Relations Manager

Alcatel-Lucent Bell

Karsten.Lemmens@Alcatel-Lucent.com

Mobile: +32 (0) 475 96 05 44

Office: +32 (0) 3 - 240 4314

 

About Touchatag:

Touchatag, an Alcatel-Lucent Venture, provides contactless payment, loyalty and communication solutions to operators and enterprises/verticals as well as a catalogue of contactless readers, tags and applications. Using RFID technology, one contactless tag can be used to invoke various applications. Touchatag also provides the touchatag developer network and APIs for application developers. Via the web service http://www.touchatag.com and the touchatag starter package, anyone can link real world items to the online world and start to create an “internet of things”. Touchatag’s functionalities can also be used with Near Field Communication enabled mobile phones.