1. History

2. The Yoyo app and Yoyo-powered apps

3. Yoyo Engage

4. PSD2 / Open Banking

5. Founders
     Alain Falys    Michael Rolph    David Nicholson  

6. Awards

7. References

8. External links

}}Yoyo Wallet is a Europe-based mobile payments and loyalty marketing platform headquartered in London, England. Through an in-house built omni-channel point-of-sale acceptance network, the company delivers a mobile payments and loyalty app experience for consumers, whilst providing retailers with a data-led service that aims to personally engage, reward and retain their customers.

For consumers, a Yoyo-powered app provides mobile payment, automated retailer-specific loyalty and digital receipt collection at the point-of-sale, as well as offers personalised to what they buy and pre-ordering functionality, at participating retail outlets...^[1]

For retailers, Yoyo identifies every customer at the point-of-sale and connects them to stock keeping unit (SKU) data to analyse individual purchasing behaviour.^[2] Through a purpose-built marketing platform, Yoyo Engage^[3], retailers can then segment and engage with customers, as well as create marketing campaigns, based on this past purchasing behaviour.

The Yoyo app first launched in 2014 and is now present in more than 1700 university and corporate catering outlets across the UK and Ireland.^[4]

After establishing itself in closed catering environments, Yoyo’s expanded into the high street, with the company partnering with several chains including Planet Organic^[5], Harris + Hoole^[6], and HOP Vietnamese^[7]

Yoyo also built a branded payment and loyalty app for Caffè Nero. Launched to the public on 10 April 2017^[8], the app is accepted in 643 Caffè Nero stores in the UK and Ireland. As of May 2018, it has been downloaded by 350,000 users and processed more than 3.6 million transactions.^[9]

In June 2018, it was announced that the Yoyo app had been downloaded by more than 1 million users.^[2]

Yoyo Wallet Limited is authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority under the Electronic Money Regulations 2011 (Firm Ref. No. 900645) for the issuing of electronic money.^[10]

History

Yoyo Wallet was founded by Alain Falys, Michael Rolph and David Nicholson in 2013.

The idea of Yoyo came about as mobile payments were beginning to emerge in 2012. Yoyo's founders said they believed mobile payments would start to play a vital role in the retail sector. After seeing the success of Starbucks' loyalty app, which had first launched in the UK in January 2012^[11], Yoyo's founding team wanted to deliver a mobile payments and loyalty experience to customers across, not one, but multiple-retailers^[12]

Additionally, the team took inspiration from the Tesco Clubcard, which was able to analyse their customers' basket data from each transaction^[12]. As well as delivering a payments and loyalty experience to consumers, Yoyo wanted to be able to identify every customer at the point-of-sale and analyse individual purchasing behaviour. With the data to hand, retailers would be able to segment and engage with customers, as well as create marketing campaigns, based on individual purchasing preferences.

In an interview with Marketing Week magazine, Michael Rolph looked back to when Yoyo first launched and said: "The founding thesis was: ‘let’s do Starbucks meets Tesco Clubcard, but better'."^[13]

Following a trial at Imperial College London, Touchstone Innovations (then known as Imperial Innovations) led two seed rounds, totalling around £2 million, for Yoyo in 2013 and 2014^[14] (Imperial Innovations had been the first fund to help incubate the Yoyo idea in the Spring of 2013).

The Yoyo app was then rolled out to all 32 of Imperial College's food and drink outlets, and by the end of 2014, 70,000 students had downloaded the Yoyo app.^[15]

During this time, Yoyo became the first company to win the Duke of York’s Pitch@Palace - a competition which aims to help entrepreneurs develop their business ideas. During the pitch, the Yoyo team asked the audience for an introduction to Caffè Nero founder Gerry Ford (this kicked off a relationship with Caffè Nero that led to the launch of the Yoyo-powered Caffè Nero app in 2017).^[16]

In 2015, Yoyo had signed more universities as customers, moved into closed corporate canteen environments, and was processing 150,000 monthly transactions, as well as growing 25% month-on-month. This led to Touchstone Innovations returning to lead a £6 million Series A round.^[17]

Less than 18 months after the Series A round, Yoyo had grown from 20 university clients to more than 70, from a few dozen corporate accounts to more than 200, and from a small presence on the high street to winning retail partnerships with Planet Organic, Harris + Hoole and HOP Vietnamese, as well as Caffè Nero.^[18]

Two months after launching the Caffè Nero payments and loyalty app, in June 2017 Yoyo raised £12 million in a Series B round, which was led by Metro AG and its venture capital fund LeadX Capital, with additional investment from Woodford Investment Management, as well as its Seed and Series A investor, Touchstone Innovations.^[18]

In November 2017, Yoyo entered into a strategic partnership with UK-based challenger bank Starling. For the first time, Starling customers would benefit from Yoyo-powered loyalty programmes when they used their payment card.^[19]

In June 2018, Yoyo entered into a strategic partnership with Visa, with the aim to enable customers to reap the benefits of loyalty programmes when they used their Visa payment cards at retailers who are partnered with Yoyo.^[2]

In July 2018, it was reported that Yoyo had been downloaded by more than 1 million users.^[2]

The Yoyo app and Yoyo-powered apps

When visiting a Yoyo-accepting merchant, customers who have downloaded the Yoyo app or a Yoyo-powered retailer branded app are given a view of their existing relationship with that retailer, including past purchases, loyalty points, stamps and vouchers that they've earned so far. Users can also send vouchers they've earned to other users and gain rewards for referring friends.

When a customer reaches a checkout, they scan a dynamic QR code through the Yoyo app in order to pay. The dynamic QR code represents a secure one-time identity token for the user which regenerates offline every 30 seconds. The Yoyo platform runs the same token generation algorithm to ensure the presented QR code is not only allocated to a genuine user, but also matches the time of the transaction.

Payment works by adding a credit or debit card to the Yoyo app. Customers do not top up their wallet and there’s no difference to using a contactless card. Payment card details are tokenised on the Yoyo app; the customer’s PAN and CVC are never stored on the device or Yoyo servers.

As part of this transaction process, Yoyo instantly automates the collection of stamps or points related to the purchase, through a rule-based reward mechanism determined by the loyalty programme a partnering retailer is running. Yoyo also delivers an instant fully-itemised digital receipt to the customer, based on the transactions they’ve made.

In July 2018, Yoyo entered into a strategic partnership with digital ordering platform Preoday to create a new, integrated way for retailers and caterers to provide pre-ordering services to their customers through the Yoyo app and Yoyo-powered apps.^[1]

Yoyo also creates purpose-built, branded apps for retailers. One example of a branded app powered by Yoyo is the Caffè Nero payments and loyalty app, which launched in April 2017. Like the Yoyo app, users can pay for their items, be automatically rewarded stamps, exchange vouchers for participating items, refer, and share rewards with friends and family through their mobile device. As of May 2018, the Caffè Nero app has been downloaded by 350,000 users and processed more than 3.6 million transactions.^[9]

The Yoyo app and all other Yoyo-powered apps are available available on iOS and Android.

Yoyo Engage

Yoyo identifies and obtains stock keeping unit (SKU) data when a customer uses the Yoyo app at the point of payment. With this data, retailers can use Yoyo’s marketing platform, Yoyo Engage, to analyse, segment and engage with customers.^[2]

Yoyo Engage provides real time insight for retailers on their customers’ behaviour and preferences, so that they can understand and segment customers based on their purchasing habits - whether it’s what customers tend to buy before 8am, the type of person who is buying certain product groups, or what items tend to be bought together. During this process, customer identity is tokenised and anonymised, which means retailers only see purchasing behaviours rather than any personal data.

Yoyo Engage also provides a full up-to-the-minute trading report for all of a retailer's outlets.

The Campaign Launcher on Yoyo Engage also enables retailers to use customer behaviour insight to run their loyalty programmes - i.e. setting loyalty points and stamp conditions, as well as issuing different types of rewards based on a specific customer segmentation.

A retailer can also create specific loyalty campaigns that could, for example, mean any app customer who buys a coffee before 9am on a Monday morning would receive double stamps or points. Or a campaign could be set up that means any Yoyo app customer who buys a coffee before 9am will receive a 20% discount on a coffee they buy after 3pm on the same day.

Yoyo Engage enables retailers to send out mobile push and email comms to customers, and can measure how consumers respond to marketing campaign activity through the Yoyo app and other Yoyo-powered apps, like the Caffè Nero app.^[20]

PSD2 / Open Banking

Two months ahead of the introduction of the Second Payment Services Directive (PSD2) in the UK, Yoyo entered into a strategic partnership with UK-based challenger bank Starling in November 2017. One of the first partnerships to take advantage of the new PSD2 framework, Yoyo functionality was integrated into Starling Bank’s API, enabling Starling customers to benefit from Yoyo-powered loyalty programmes when they used their payment card.^[21]

In March 2018, Yoyo's co-founder David Nicholson and, CCO, Simon Moran, made a presentation at Finovate 2018 in London demonstrating how Yoyo had become the first company in the world to tap into debit and credit card payment data and instantly apply retailer loyalty points and stamps at the point-of-sale, while pushing an itemised receipt back into a card’s user’s associated banking app.^[22]

Three months later, Yoyo announced a new strategic partnership with Visa at a Money 20/20 conference, which took place in London in June 2018. Both companies said they wanted to enable customers to reap the benefits of loyalty programmes when they use their Visa payment cards at retailers partnered with Yoyo. One month after the partnership with Visa was announced, Yoyo went past the 1 million user mark.^[2]

Founders

Alain Falys

Alain Falys is a co-founder and chairman of Yoyo. He was CEO of the company from launch until December 2017, when he became chairman.

Previously, he co-founded the OB10 global e-invoicing network, which floated in London as Tungsten Corporation Plc. He was also a senior vice president at Visa International and co-founded Omnis Mundi, an e-commerce incubator, with successful startups such as BuyVip sold to Amazon in 2010.

Alain is also currently a partner at Firestartr.co, a tech startup investment platform, a venture partner at Touchstone Innovations Plc and a director at Pelican.ai and OneLinq.nl.

Alain holds the Diplôme d’Etudes Supérieures Européennes de Management from the NEOMA Business School and a BA Honours degree in European Business Administration from the Middlesex University, London.

Michael Rolph

Michael Rolph is a co-founder and CEO at Yoyo. Michael was initially chief product officer until December 2017, when he became CEO.

He was previously an advisor at Azimo, a mobile and internet money transfer company, and a mentor at Seedcamp, where he helped jumpstart the entrepreneurial community in Europe.

Prior to that, Michael was non-executive director at The MoBank Group, which specialises in creating and operating transactional systems for mobile commerce, banking and payments. He was also director and EiR at Anthemis Group, a specialist advisory firm for growth-stage companies in financial services, markets and technology.

Michael has also held senior roles at PayPal, First Data Corporation and Barclaycard Business.

David Nicholson

David Nicholson is a co-founder and COO at Yoyo.

David is also the inventor and co-founder of Zopa – the worlds first lending and borrowing exchange.^[23] He is also founder and CEO of Axial Tilt, a consulting company specialising in growth strategy and new business development, as well as a board member of marketing automation company Kulea MA.

Awards

2018: Best Customer Experience Strategy, CIM Marketing Excellence Awards^[24]

2018: Best Mobile Payment Solution, Merchant Payments Ecosystem Awards^[25]

2018: In-Store Innovation of the Year, Retail Systems Awards^[26]

2018: Mobile Tech Vendor of the Year, Retail Systems Awards^[26]

2018: Overall Winner, Retail Systems Awards^[26]

2017: Most Effective Loyalty and Rewards Campaign, Effective Mobile Marketing Awards^[27]

2015: Top 50 Emerging Stars, KPMG Fintech 100^[28]

2014: Inaugural Winner, Duke of York's Pitch@Palace^[16]

References

External links

• [https://blog.yoyowallet.com Official website]
• [https://blog.yoyowallet.com Yoyo Insight]

• Lucy Kay
• Lucy Killea
• Lucy Kiraly
• Lucy Kubuu
• Lucy Laney
• Lucy Li
• Lucy Louisa Coues Flower
• Lucy Love
• Lucy Love (musician)
• Lucy (Lucy Wainwright Roche album)
• Lucy Lyttelton Cameron
• Lucy MacGregor
• Lucy Macgregor
• Lucy Mack
• Lucy Mackintosh
• Lucy Madox Brown
• Lucy Madox Rossetti
• Lucy-mae Beacock
• Lucy Mallon
• Lucy Mannheim
• Lucy Mansel
• Lucy Manvers
• Lucy Margaret Grounds
• Lucy Maria Field Wanzer
• Lucy Martin