Mobile commerce is an exciting new development for consumers, retailers and consumer credit companies alike. In the United Kingdom alone, 2012 witnessed an astounding 300% growth in sales through this medium.
Here is how Mindtree helped a card issuer and leader in global payments develop an iPhone and iPad application to increase their penetration in mobile commerce in the United Kingdom, United States and other geographies.
The challenge
The customer wanted to drive revenues by engaging card holders through an iPhone and iPad application that would deliver the latest offers, current events and other information to their devices.
The application also needed to be integrated with social media platforms, and allow customization―such as separate versions for the United Kingdom and United States. In particular, the card major wanted to engage residents and visitors to London through the application around the 2012 Summer Olympics.
The customer was therefore looking for a technology partner with deep mobile domain knowledge that could rapidly develop a high-quality application, without compromising on performance standards. Specifically it wanted to:
- Launch the application far in advance of the London 2012 Summer Olympics
- Ensure that the application would be of high quality, easy to enhance and easy to integrate with other existing applications
- Ensure the application would be user friendly, have attractive animations and a rich graphical user interface
- Ensure compatibility with upcoming iOS versions and devices from Apple
Our solution
Mindtree collaborated with the customer to develop a mobile application that could retrieve data from multiple sources along with updates from social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter. Mindtree's solution included the following key phases:
- System analysis and requirements documentation
- Detailed design, security interaction and solution architecture design and documentation
- Portable and reliable design creation
- Interface design for data parsing and processing so the application could handle large numbers of network calls at a time
- Offer and event plotting on iOS integrated maps (both Google as well Apple provided)
- ‘Locate Me’ feature implementation to bring the map back to the user’s current location
- Provision to view the list of offers and events sorted in terms of business preference
- Filtering functionality to sort offers based on user interests
- Card registration feature linked to offer redemption using the application. The user would be able to swipe the same card at a merchant to avail offers
- Social media interface development allowing users to tweet about a particular offer, post on their Facebook wall and share via email
- Unit tests creation and execution for the app to ensure quality and optimum performance
Business impact
- More than 70,000 downloads in first two weeks after the application was launched
- Higher consumer engagement through useful information and relevant offers delivered to their device
- Support for future revenue growth through a scalable mobile platform
