Yaap, a joint venture between Spanish banks CaixaBank and Banco Santander, and mobile network operator Telefonica, has launched a mobile commerce platform that lets consumers access merchant offers on their mobile device and then redeem them automatically by simply paying for a purchase with a pre-linked debit or credit card.

Yaap Shopping aims to become Spain’s largest customer loyalty network by “uniting tens of thousands of businesses under one service,” the partners say.

Now live in the cities of Valladolid and Palma de Mallorca with 200 participating businesses, the service is due to be expanded to additional Spanish cities in the coming months.

Yaap Shopping is open to all Spanish consumers. To participate, shoppers download the mobile app and link their debit and credit card details. Any card from Visa or MasterCard can be used.

They can then access two types of offer. Direct discounts are available across a merchant’s inventory and are applied when a customer makes an in-store purchase using any of the payment cards they have linked to their Yaap app. Product offers apply to particular products and must be purchased using the Yaap mobile app. Once the purchase has been made, the shopper can then collect the item from their local store.

To support the launch, Yaap technology has been integrated into every Banco Santander and CaixaBank point-of-sale terminal across Spain. This upgrade enables the cloud-based Yaap engine to link the credit or debit card used by the shopper with relevant offers and apply the correct discount at the checkout.

“When you register within the application, you have several ways of viewing the offers,” a Yaap spokesman explained to NFC World+. “You can see all the offers within your city for example, and there are several filters so you can decide whether to look for specific types of offers, you can filter by sector or by how far away you are from your specific position. It’s the user that always chooses what type of offers they want to see.

“Once the client has registered and has stored their credit and debit card details, all the offers are active. That means that the client can go directly to the shop, buy the product with their card and the offer is automatically made without any immediate interaction. So, once you register, we can see all the merchants that are on the platform and if a consumer pays with one of their stored cards, those offers are going to be applied to the transaction.”

“Imagine I am looking at the offers from a shoe shop,” the spokesman added. “The shoe shop has two types of offers. The first offer is that every single customer that buys a pair of shoes worth more than €100 gets a 20% discount. The second offer is on a specific pair of shoes which, instead of being priced at €200, they are now priced at €120.

“If a customer goes to the shop and buys any pair of shoes that cost more than €100 without doing anything before, the system is going to apply the discount. If the client wants the specific blue pair of shoes, they have to go into the application and buy the shoes in the application, and two seconds later they can go into the shop and get the shoes.

“For the moment, Yaap is for the merchants that actually work with Caixabank and Banco Santander, but we trust many other banks will be part of Yaap soon.”