MobileLime Recruits First ISO in Effort to Sell Merchants Nationally

Seeking to broaden its reach as it rolls out to merchants nationally, Vayusa Inc. has begun to recruit independent sales organizations to sell its MobileLime cell-phone-based loyalty and rewards system. MobileLime, which earlier this year signed its first merchant outside the Northeast, this week announced Vision Payments Solutions LLC, a Portland, Maine-based ISO, is its first reseller, and more such deals are on the way, the company says. “Our strategy was always not only to sell to merchants but to cultivate independent sales channels,” says Robert Wesley, president and chief executive of MobileLime. Wesley says at least one more distributor could be announced in as soon as two weeks. Vision Payments Solutions will sell MobileLime's loyalty-and-rewards program alongside credit and debit card acceptance to new merchants and as an added product to existing ones. The program, which has been streamlined to work with point-of-sale terminals, allows merchants to collect cell-phone numbers and aggregate product data at the point of sale to run cumulative-spending, frequency, and purchase step-up rewards programs for opt-in customers. The MobileLime software, which is available to merchants as a download, works with VeriFone Holdings Inc.'s multiapplication terminals. “We've packaged it so it's almost MobileLime in a box,” says Wesley. The advantage to merchants, Wesley says, is that the service is cardless and fobless, cutting the cost of introducing and running a loyalty program. “It eliminates all the cost associated with plastic,” he says. ISOs find it easy to sell, he adds, for the same reason. “Our product has a much shorter sales cycle,” he says. “You can offer the product without the salesperson's time being consumed by [things like] picking out the color of a card.” Wesley refuses to reveal either MobileLime's compensation to ISOs or merchant fees to MobileLime for the loyalty service. MobileLime's proximity-payment service, which relies on near-field communication chips embedded in phones (Digital Transactions News, Feb. 22), is not part of the product available to ISOs for now. “We're laying the track, and the first product rolling out on it is a rewards-based product,” Wesley says. In payments, MobileLime acts a a gateway, funneling transactions to any of a number of third-party processors. Three-year-old MobileLime, which started out processing handset-based payments in Boston and now processes for 80 merchants, signed its first merchant outside the Northeast in February when Potash Bros. Supermarts, a high-end, two-store grocer in Chicago, joined the network. Around the same time, the company began courting ISOs as resellers for a national push. The deal with Vision Payments Solutions, Wesley says, resulted from MobileLime's attendance as an exhibitor at the Electronic Transactions Association's annual trade show in April. The ETA is a Washington, D.C.-based trade association for ISOs.