ANZ banks on loyalty to boost chip card take-up - News - Business

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This story was printed from ZDNet Australia.
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ANZ banks on loyalty to boost chip card take-up

By James Pearce, ZDNet Australia
July 15, 2002
URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/business/soa/ANZ-banks-on-loyalty-to-boost-chip-card-take-up/0,139023166,120266686,00.htm

ANZ has introduced a new reward system to encourage users to switch to its chip-based Visa cards, a technology that has been slow to take off in Australia.

"Chip technology allows us to offer customers more immediate and attainable rewards than any other program in Australia," ANZ managing director for credit cards Australia, Kamran Siddiqi, said in a statement.

According to an ANZ spokesperson, the reward system has two streams. The first stream is a traditional points-based system and the second stream, -Instant Rewards", is where certain stores offer discounts and incentives to consumers who purchase using the chip-based cards.

However, the main benefits of the cards still go to merchants and ANZ, through the use of the MultiPOS system that is used to read the cards.

-The MultiPOS systems make it a lot faster to do software upgrades," the ANZ spokesperson told ZDNet Australia. -We can download the new software directly, send it downline, whereas before we'd have to send out a courier to pick up the terminal."

Since the introduction of ANZ's chip-based cards in November, 350,000 people have signed up and over 30,000 retailers have had the infrastructure installed, according to ANZ.

The spokesperson for the bank said that ANZ expects the technology to evolve over time, and will eventually allow ANZ to host loyalty programs for individual stores.