Coffee Republic tastes another flavour of wave and pay

Coffee Republic has kicked off a pilot that will see its loyalty card provider sQuid supply a contactless payment service to the café chain.

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The scheme will run for around three months in three London locations: Cabot Place in Canary Warf, Broadgate Exchange in Liverpool Street and Bluewater shopping centre.

Coffee Republic spokesman Aruna Withane told silicon.com the locations had been chosen carefully to test the cards across as wide a range of consumer and store formats as possible.

"Bluewater is a high traffic location and there is big pick up in terms of loyalty with both employees and shoppers. Broadgate is an office complex and customers are likely to be commuters. The location will get peaks of traffic only at certain times a day. Canary Warf is more grab and go. It's a small format location with five seats," he said.

Coffee Republic has already rolled out a contactless payments system in July with Barclaycard, but Withane says there is no conflict between the two payment schemes.

The deal with sQuid is around tying use of wave and pay into the loyalty scheme, he said, with shoppers getting reward points every time they use the sQuid card, which can then be redeemed at any participating outlet. Cards can be topped up at any outlet at the point of sale.

"Visa can't do reconciliation of account between multiple sites. We needed a card that could be used to collect loyalty points in any location," Withane added.

The cards will be marketed to customers at the point of sale and there will be an incentive scheme to encourage staff to introduce the payment method to them.

The sQuid payment card will be rolled out to the rest of the chain's 200 company owned, franchised and concession sites, if the trial proves a success.

Withane noted: "Whether we will roll this out to our quieter branches in remoter areas is not decided but this should suit our sites in urban areas. With the trial going live in December and running through January, we will have sales data on our busiest and slowest months of the year, so we should have a good average. We will have made the decision by February or March."