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One card that pays all

Consumers appreciate the convenience of a prepaid card for mobile phones. They like the convenience of a debit or credit card. Now Intrex India is looking to extend this convenience to most daily payments

With the advent of prepaid cards for cell phones and credit cards, the definition of ‘paying up’ has certainly been modified.

Alternate means of paying dues do seem to be anoption. Cashing in on this idea, officials at Intrex India decided to come up with, Itz Cash , an easy means of extending the idea of a prepaid card to a convenient and easy mode of paying for your daily purchases.

The aim at Intrex was to introduce a multi-purpose value card of several denominations (Rs 100, 250 & 500) which can be used to purchase various goods and services from affiliated merchants based on the ‘anywhere, anytime’ concept.

Itz Cash is a complete prepaid management system which manages processes related to all participants i.e. businesses, sales channels, consumers and others.

It allows various business organisations to sell their product and services to consumers on a Direct-to-Home model without any incremental investment.

The project started in March 2002 and was completed by July 2006. According to Intrex, it has benefited over 30,00,000 customers so far.

This card offers users numerous services. For instance, if an Itz Cash user wishes to purchase prepaid vouchers online, he will have to go to the Itz Cash Prepaid Module and log-in with his username and password (or register if he is a new user), select the service provider from the list of Operators, choose the voucher that he would like to purchase, and click on Buy Now. He will then have to enter the Itz Cash account number and password, confirm his payment, note down the pin number, and follow instructions listed to use his prepaid voucher.

The question here is, what is so lucrative about this initiative so as to convince some FMCG major to adopt such a mode of payment? Reasons Prakash Pawar, CTO and Head, HRD & Operations, Intrex India: “This mainly benefits companies which need to regularly make collections from their dealers and (like Dish TV) have a wide geographical spread in India. Collections made are typically transferred to the company on the next working day.”

How did it all begin?

“We developed an auction system for Zee TV which was our first client,” explains Pawar. This initiative involved an auction management system (linked to their card system) with the facility of blocking a fixed amount from the card for each auction that the user participated in. Even though this application reached the testing phase, it was not actually implemented for non-technical reasons. It did however help them get other clients such as Playwin, rediff.com and IRCTC. Today, they have close to 80 merchants.

When asked about their marketing plans, Pawar says, “We have introduced co-branded cards to promote certain merchants, such as the Jackpot card (Playwin) and the Dish Card (Dish TV).” They also have introduced an Itz Gift card, which can be used by companies as gifts.

Roadmap

They have introduced and plan to introduce more types of cards on which only certain applications are available to promote use in specific target segments (such as Itz Cash Plus card for Mobile top-ups). The company also plans to introduce a travel card for companies with which they can book their corporate travel requirements.

The introduction of a magnetic stripe-based scratch tape-card is also in the pipeline. This card can be used through physical handheld terminals in addition to the Internet, SMS and IVR. They plan to introduce a special card with barcode instead of a scratch tape to be used in loyalty programmes. Card data would be read by barcode readers and sent directly to the company’s systems.