Pay By Touch Acquires S&H Solutions/S&H Green Points and its Advanced Promotion Engine to Bring Personalized Marketing Applications to its Popular Biometric Payment Platform
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – (December 6, 2006) – In keeping with its corporate strategy to acquire companies that complement its portfolio and provide future growth opportunities, Pay By Touch today announced that it has acquired S&H Solutions (S&H) and its parent company S&H greenpoints.
Pay By Touch, founded in 2002, sees the deal as a ``perfect fit'' in its plan to use the fingerprint to preclude the need to carry around debit and credit cards, cut merchant costs by processing transactions to sidestep Visa and MasterCard's networks, and steer customized promotions to consumers.
S&H, which dates to 1896, is renowned for its early role in rewarding loyal customers. Generations of grocery shoppers collected Green Stamps at the supermarket, pasted them into books and redeemed them for merchandise. That program has evolved into a digital rewards program called S&H greenpoints.The two companies previously had teamed up for a pilot program at a grocery store in Rochester, N.Y., where customers pressed their fingers to a reader at a kiosk to receive coupons tailored to their past purchases. Shoppers redeemed 8 to 40 percent of the coupons, vs. the typical rate of less than 1 percent, a spokeswoman said.
The purchase price was in excess of $100 million in cash and stock. S&H Solutions is a leading provider of customer-based loyalty marketing and retail solutions. Many years and more than $200 million dollars have gone into developing the company's real-time marketing technologies, including a highly sophisticated analytical engine that enables retailers to deliver one-to-one consumer messages in-store through multiple proprietary platforms.
"S&H Solutions' unique marketing technologies and advanced promotion engine are years ahead of anything else in the marketplace. We looked at personalized marketing services, and, around the world, none of them even comes close," said John Rogers, Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Pay By Touch.
"S&H's unparalleled solutions and top-tier team make it the perfect strategic fit with Pay By Touch. We are extremely pleased to welcome the S&H team, and look forward to working together to help merchants deliver the right offer to the right shopper at the right time."S&H Solutions' suite of services also includes the S&H greenpoints® Reward Program, the digital reinvention of the Sperry & Hutchinson Company's Green Stamps. The nation's first loyalty marketing program (circa 1896), the S&H greenpoints program rewards millions of consumers with points for every dollar they spend at participating merchants."Pay By Touch is the leader in biometric authentication for payments and S&H has built world class loyalty marketing systems," said Ron Pedersen, CEO of S&H Solutions. "Together we will transform the personalized marketing industry by offering unprecedented opportunities for relevance marketing and customization."
In connection with the S&H acquisition, Pay By Touch is also pleased to announce that J. Stuart Moore, a Director of S&H Solutions, will join the Pay By Touch Board of Directors. Mr. Moore is also Co-Founder and Director, and formerly Co-Chairman and Co-CEO, of Sapient Corporation.
About Pay By Touch
Pay By Touch (http://www.paybytouch.com/) is wowing the world one touch at a time as the global leader in biometric authentication, personalized marketing and payment solutions. To date, patented Pay By Touch™ biometric services enable 3.4 million shoppers to quickly and securely access personal accounts using a finger scan to identify themselves, make purchases and cash checks at 2,700 locations nationwide. It also provides robust payment processing solutions for ACH (electronic checking), card-present and card-not-present debit and credit transactions for retail clients. Founded in 2002 and headquartered in San Francisco, Pay By Touch employs 700 professionals and holds more than 50 patents worldwide on secure, convenient and cost-effective transaction solutions.
About S&H Solutions
S&H Solutions is a leading provider of customer-based loyalty marketing and retail solutions. The company provides sophisticated, real-time technology and knowledge that enables retailers to deliver one-to-one messages in-store through multiple proprietary platforms. S&H, Green Stamps, S&H greenpoints, greenpoints and S&H Solutions are registered service marks of The Sperry and Hutchinson Company, Inc. Additional information is available at http://www.shsolutions.com/ and http://www.greenpoints.com/.
