Saturday, December 08, 2007

New business idea

My new 'brilliant' business idea. (or should I call it a future prediction?)

I think there should be a loyalty card - a bit like fly buys - but with a difference.

The terms and conditions say you can deny it to anyone.

In the long run the card needs to be a smart card of some sort because I plan to put a bit of fairly dynamic information on it in the long run - although you can start out simple.

When people apply you do
1) A police check
2) A credit check
3) Possibly only offer it based on criteria like having a lot of positive feedback on trade me.
4) Possibly general internet check
5) a confirmation of birth certificate/passport search of the deaths registry etc
6) anything else

they sign somthing to give you the appropriate rights.

In the long run this will require some deals with the appropriate agencies to get access to the databases on a fixed sum as opposed to transaction by transaction basis to keep costs down.

The point is to get a set of people that you can promote to companies as "highly honest and reliable". A lot of companies spend a lot of money trying to sort out "high risk" and low risk customers and distrust of your own customers creates some significant costs.

For and extreme example, if a car company for example could 100% trust it's customers they could leave their store open to those customers all night with no staff there. They could allow test drives without the sales people in the car and the could offer no questions asked returns etc. those same offers will start to make the card very attractive to customers.

Now the whole point is having a group that you can guarantee are reliable. SO for example if a person goes to court you suspend the card if anyone challenges their reliability (particularly a business that is providing a discount) then you suspend their account prior to investigation, if the police record or credit record changes it gets suspended.

The card could also have a grading system so that you could leave the card active but still downgrade their rating on such things that one doesn't want to cause a 'stink' about and also to indicate how deeply you were allowed to check into their history, to encourage full disclosure from those that have nothing to hide.

The data could also have some context specific aspects to it - i.e. separate out credit and criminal honesty etc in case the sponsors care. But the cards of course don’t record any details of the event because that would make them a liability - just generic grading.

Takes a bit of salesmanship and marketing to get it going though - unless you can get a loyalty card business onboard and it is kinda niche so they probably wouldn't want to just change over a card system.

1 Comments:

Blogger Nigel Kearney said...

How do you make money out of this? Specifically, does the cardholder pay or the retailer pay?

If the cardholder, how much do you think someone would pay for such a card and will it cover costs and provide a decent profit? The card will need to be time limited as well and renewable on the condition that nothing has changed.

If the retailer pays, then it cannot be that mere possession of the card is proof of honesty. You would need a website or something where the retailer puts in the card number, pays a small fee and gets back a report.

2:22 PM  

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