Massive Monzo fan and investor here. I’m a cofounder of Scrummy Loyalty. We operate a loyalty platform for small but highly awesome merchants.
After a few chats with Sachin Karia and some help from Dan Palmer, we’ve put together a proof of concept for a new way for to issue loyalty points.
Take a look, we’d love to hear your thoughts on it. Also, we’ll be exhibiting this at TechDay Thursday 27th October. If you’re there, come and grab some sweets and say hi.
Apologies for anyone offended my large numbers of unread emails
So you’ve already created an integration with a more intelligent take on loyalty cards - that’s excellent
I kind of guess the way it basically works is that each merchant has a unique QR code to for their customers to scan and when they do their Scrummy app account is linked to that merchant for that transaction?
This is so much better than asking a checkout operator to scan your phone, they get fed up so manually type the number in.
Have you got many merchants registered in the South East?
Yes that’s exactly how it works today. It works well but there’s always room for improvement.
Do you mean South East London or SE of the country? We have lots of places in Peckham, East Dulwich and Brixton. We’re currently raising a seed round to get lots more merchants on board.
I’m in Kent, traveling to London every few months. I tend to shop at bigger chains rather than local/independents. Saying that I do have a preferred off licence, obviously some preferred local pubs and a favourite barber so there’s some potential use for me when Scrummy starts in my area. Understandablely though, I can imagine you having better luck, in early days, building stability and word of mouth in big cities before branching out to towns and rural arenas.
This sounds interesting but I’m guessing if a merchant decides they won’t take part (I’m presuming most of the big ones will) then nothing can be earned?
Going by the history of Nectar, I’d assume the big ones would want to negotiate a contract that prevents their direct competitors from being allowed to join. Sainsburys won’t allow the other big supermarkets, BP won’t allow Shell, etc, etc. Capitalism does not benefit the consumers. It sucks
If they stopped being “stubborn” they would probably realise working together could do them more good than it would harm; more insight into more than one shop would benefit them all - but I see this as a quick point of failure, I do hope it goes far though!
@anon44204028@DylanDuffy well if enough people sign up to Scrummy (& they can hold out in the meantime), they’ll have enough leverage to say no to this kind of demand
It’s really just aimed at the long tail of merchants, the smaller and more independent places that give much more generous rewards for loyalty. Nowhere in Middlesex yet, we’re raising a seed round in order to grow our merchant base currently.
For checkout operators, this could easily be another conversation starter (on top of the others already in place) as it’d be a instant benefit to them as they don’t have to present a loyalty code to scan. This eventually leads them creating a Monzo account too!
The current process is that the merchant signs up with us, we then send them a QR code, they then promote their loyalty programme to their customers and issue points when their customers scan the QR codes. In this sense, the stamp is the QR code and the card is the app.
We have about 80 merchants that use this method at the moment.
Yes, you’re right about the new integration. The stamp would happen in the background. The customer just pays with their Monzo card and they get the points automatically. The customer just needs to have authorised Scrummy to be notified when they visit that particular merchant.
