Capgemini partners with Ascribe to produce loyalty and rewards programs

Capgemini today announced an alliance with ascribe GmbH to develop a blockchain database solution built on BigchainDB.

The Paris based consulting, technology, and outsourcing services provider is present in over 40 countries, employing over 180,000 people worldwide.

The Group reported global revenues of €11.9 billion in 2015, an increase of 12.7% over the previous year. While the company has headquarters in France, North American operations bring in the most revenue, 20% and 28% of total the Group revenue respectively.

The Group operates four main business areas; Consulting services, Local professional services, Application services and Other managed services. Application services accounted for 59% of Group revenues in 2015, with 6.3% growth driven by investment in innovation around Digital & Cloud.

“Our Digital and Cloud offerings grew 23% in 2015 and account for 22% of revenues. These domains will remain in our top priorities for investments in 2016.”
— – Capgemini

Capgemini seems to have caught the blockchain bug last year. They published a report in November advising clients that financial service firms could “no longer afford to ignore blockchain tech.” A few months later, in mid-April, Capgemini added a whole suite of blockchain consulting services for banking and finance.

“Blockchain distributed-ledger architecture has the potential to enhance security, speed, and operational efficiency for banks in several business areas such as payments, asset management, loyalty, and loans. It can also be used to resolve bottlenecks within regulatory processes such as KYC, fraud and AML.”

• Capgemini

The latest announcement marks the company’s first foray into blockchain based loyalty reward programmes. Unlike most blockchain-related services and programs announced by large corporations, this one has a hint of delivery sooner rather than later. “We’re going to develop multiple proof-of-concepts that are immediately applicable to the real-world,” said Bruce Pon, the executive over BigchainDB. "The world wants prototypes and use cases for blockchain technologies."

Focusing on loyalty and rewards programs, such as frequent flyer miles or Starbucks Gift cards, may be easier than other financial services, given the amount of regulation that applies to them. Offering programs that take advantage of a blockchain to cut their costs and increase product integrity is a great way to test blockchain technology, and do so without waiting for all the regulatory red tape to be cut.

However, there was a technical challenge that had to be overcome first. Even the Starbucks card network routinely has more transactions per second than the Bitcoin blockchain is capable of processing today. What Capgemini needed was a blockchain with far more bandwidth, and they turned to Ascribe for their new blockchain service called BigChainDB.

“The world wants prototypes and use cases for blockchain technologies,” Pon said in their joint release. “Working with Capgemini, we’re going to develop multiple proof-of-concepts that are immediately applicable to the real-world.”

Ascribe launched their digital intellectual property tracking service last June, setting out to build the ownership layer of the internet. It has grown to over 5,000 creators today declaring over 10,000 works and over 35,000 unique editions in their system.

They followed up on that success by launching their BigChainDB project in February, which is meant to be nothing short of a replacement for the Bitcoin blockchain itself, in order to fix the scaling problem for large amounts of information.

While Bitcoin’s blockchain may scale up to that level one day, it isn’t at all likely to happen in the next few years so BigChainDB makes a lot of sense for this purpose, assuming they can handle the security of the blockchain well too.

This isn’t the first time Capgemini has stepped foot into the world of loyalty programs. For a study released last March, the company researched the loyalty programs of 160 global companies across the Retail, Banking, Consumer Products, Telecom, Airlines, Hotel Chains and Consumer Electronics sectors. They also spoke directly with over 40,000 consumers on social media to learn customer opinions towards loyalty reward programs.

One of the main takeaways from was that the programs need to adapt to the digital age much better, allowing for more customer interaction, in both directions, through smartphone apps. “Providing value beyond traditional rewards” was mentioned several times, and perhaps the benefits derived by using a blockchain are one way CapGemini has found to offer that value.

Capgemini’s alliance may be the largest attempt at placing a rewards program on a blockchain, it won’t be the first to announce such a project. The Royal Bank of Canada is testing a similar loyalty program on a smaller scale, naming Ripple as their technology partner on that project.

However, New York-based blockchain startup Loyyal, formerly Ribbit.me, is likely the first to attempt the process, having announced their open platform for loyalty rewards as far back as the fall of 2014. Earlier this month they announced a test with partner Deloitte to integrate their blockchain-based rewards program with the gargantuan professional services firm.