The fall and rise of ViVOtech, their NFC ecosystem and your pink slip

If ViVOtech is not on your short list for NFC POS terminals, wallets and other services you should be fired!

ViVOtech – they’re the firm that sells NFC POS terminals, right? Wrong. Gone are the days where ViVOtech can be categorized as just a payments hardware firm who have niched themselves in NFC.  These days ViVOtech are an NFC ecosystem unto themselves. After parting ways with Verifone, ViVOtech found themselves between a rock and a hard place. From what we hear had that old problem of more cash going out than was coming in. No different to most of America at this point then!

Earlier this year, however, the firm got a cash injection from its investors and gave itself a mandate to redefine itself and its position in the market. From what we have seen ViVOtech has not only refined its model but has become one of the most compelling payments and loyalty, wallet, marketing and point-of-sale ecosystems in the business, all while staying true to their pioneering NFC roots. Here’s why.

ViVOtech are a retailing ecosystem that maximizes NFC and supports legacy payments while adding value added services

Imagine, if you will, that you are a retailer who is looking to maximize your ROI on a the POS aspect of your business. You have looked into NFC but at best you find the pieces surrounding payments, loyalty, store shelf POS and NFC mobile wallets don’t all fit together quite correctly and you will need to pay integrators to get your full system up and running. Oh, and because you have invested a lot of money in your brand you want it all white labelled and you want it to tie in with your online web property. My, you are picky.

That isn’t to even mention NFC loyalty programs, corresponding consumer apps / NFC mobile wallets and probably the biggest opportunity in NFC marketing, which you need managed through your POS system so you can easily work out cost-per-sale marketing costs and that magic figure of ROI on a per campaign basis. So what do you do? Yup, you wait until next year for the upgrade or go to a provider for NFC POS terminals and decide to integrate everything together later. What a headache.

NFC is a complex ecosystem for sure. There are hardware companies, trusted services managers, merchants, marketing platforms for analytics… We could go on but you already know these pain points. We visited ViVOtech at WIMA and were pleasantly surprised at how many pieces of the puzzle the firm had built under one platform. They have broken down their product offerings into four distinct categories so people like us here at NFC Rumors can explain them to folks like you who have been charged with researching contactless ecosystems.

• Mobile marketing
• Mobile loyalty
• Mobile payment, and
• Mobile merchandizing

Of course, that is a top level overview and doesn’t account for the NFC mobile wallets, trusted serve manager services and a whole host of other offerings the firm has. However, how ViVOtech has put their NFC ecosystem together addresses every part of the retail experience process. That process starts at home where consumers are researching products via their smartphones and has the ability to offer coupons there and then to gently persuade your store is the one to visit.

From there you can offer “touch download coupons or prepaid cards” by tapping at a kiosk or NFC smartposter in popular locations to pick up the stragglers who didn’t do their homework in deciding where to purchase a particular item. ViVOtech also have a novel system called Mall Checkin where consumers can check in to a mall with their NFC smartphones and receive timely offers during their visit. Proximity marketing is relevant to consumers and helps with those impulse purchases and this feature alone could attract more consumers to your store. Refining even further ViVOtech’s system also allows for a store check in.

This allows for real time analytics and for retailers to know who is coming into their stores. It also acts as a permission based way for retailers to form relationships with consumers and to provide loyalty programs that keep consumers coming back visit after visit. The system doesn’t just send out an SMS text for those offers, it literally downloads them into consumers NFC mobile wallets which certainly adds a frictionless component to the whole process. If that process wasn’t frictionless, quite frankly, consumers wouldn’t use it.

ViVotech NFC ecosystem summary

There are lots of great NFC retail services out there and as well as ViVOtech, and we would encourage you to check out Proximiant and their digital receipts, ShelfX which is just awesome, Narian Technologies and their retail service apps can’t be missed, and you can never count out Verifone. In essence, we’re not telling you to go place your order with ViVOtech right now.

It’s not our place to and you know the needs of your particular business model. We aren’t even telling you that ViVOtech is the best for your business as there are other great businesses in this space and really novel providers that we speak about frequently here at NFC Rumors. However, we do have quite a lot of exposure to NFC mobile wallets and NFC POS systems over here at the site and we are telling you that if ViVOtech isn’t on your short list of firms to contact about your new NFC POS ecosystem you should probably call up HR and ask them to send you over a pink slip.