Students and staff at The London School of Economics and Political Science may use a single contactless card to access school facilities and make purchases on campus using technology developed by United Kingdom-based electronic funds provider sQuid. The school is issuing the cards to new students, and it will enable existing students and staff to upgrade their older cards by yearend.
The card, which sQuid developed with Euclid Ltd., a UK-based smart card bureau, also enables students and staff to access preloaded funds and check out library books. The prepaid account enables cardholders to pay for small-value items at various restaurants and cafes at the school, which also plans to add a loyalty rewards program to the card. When launched, the card will only work at participating on-campus merchants.
The card is not tied to any bank or card-issuing company. Students may reload the card account using a debit or credit card or through a funds transfer from a bank account, a spokesperson from The London School Of Economics tells PaymentsSource. Cardholders may reload their accounts, track transactions and manage their funds online.
SQuid designed the card so cardholders could make purchases of less than £10 (US$15 or 12 euros), but cardholders are not limited to this amount, a sQuid spokesperson tells PaymentsSource. Additionally, while cardholders may add funds to the card account as often as they want, under UK Financial Services Authority regulations “cardholders may not load more than 150 euros to the card at anyone time,” the sQuid spokesperson says.
When added at a later date, the loyalty component would include incentives and promotions so students and staff could earn rewards when using the card on campus, the school spokesperson says.
SQuid provides rewards such as 10% cash back, a £2.50 reward when registering or topping up a card account online, opportunities to win an Apple Inc. iPod Nano by using the card before a specific time and monthly drawings to win a £50 credit, the sQuid spokesperson says.
The card also will have a “loyalty purse,” the sQuid spokesperson says. A loyalty purse is a “second, private purse on the smart card in which value may be stored as it is earned, which may then be redeemed against subsequent purchases on campus,” the sQuid spokesperson explains.
The card is free to both students and staff, and participating merchants pay a transaction fee equal to 1.5% of each sale, the spokesperson notes. SQuid provides the school with point-of-sale terminals and contactless readers, the sQuid spokesperson says.
The terminal has the sQuid application and a secure security account manager, the sQuid spokesperson says. However, the sQuid application “technically can co-exist on existing third-party terminals, but the sQuid-enabled terminals are part of the deal with the schools,” the sQuid spokesperson notes.
The school believes students and staff will adopt the updated campus ID card quickly because using one card for several purposes “can make the lives of students and staff easier,” Janine Eagling, the school’s senior project manager in information-technology services, said in a recent news release. Plus the system is fairly fast to implement,” she added.
“With any types of products, like a prepaid card, it’s a big convenience factor for cardholders,” Megan Bramlette, a director with Auriemma Consulting Group, tells PaymentsSource. Multifunctional campus cards are not as common in the UK as they are in the United States, but because The London School of Economics is an “urban school, it makes sense to unify the currency,” she adds.
The rewards aspect is a “smart strategy” because “presumably students have other ways of making payments, so the card needs to compete with existing products already in their wallets,” Bramlette says. “Adding a rewards program is a good way to get traction on what students want,” she notes.
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