In an article by The Wise Marketer last week, Pay By Touch announced plans to roll out kiosks with a variety of retail clients that will rapidly enroll customers in their loyalty programs. Pay By Touch, the biometric payments provider, is piloting its ‘Rapid Enrol’ kiosk with retailers in specific geographic regions, namely NY, New England, Wisconsin and Florida. This is obviously useful for retailers, who can eliminate tiresome paper trails and data entry for consumers with the new electronic enrollment. Plus, electronic enrollment is easier for customers and will most likely yield greater customer sign-ups. The interesting take-away is that Pay By Touch, which has developed a brand name in the marketplace with biometric payments at the point-of-sale with fingerprint recognition tied to credit cards, is going down the road of a seemingly unrelated business with kiosks. I’m not sure how this business will benefit Pay By Touch in the short term, given the cost-intensiveness of building and deploying kiosks. If Pay By Touch is looking to build additional functionality into these kiosks over time with self-checkout or biometric payments, then this seems to make long-term strategic sense. At first glance, it seems like a tangential business that will potentially create greater headaches than benefits over the short-term.
