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IN PHOTO: A woman leaves a shopping mall in central Sydney September 1, 2011. Australian retail sales picked up in July, the first time in three months, but investment spending surged in the second quarter on the back of a record mining boom. REUTERS/Daniel Munoz

Commonwealth Bank of Australia’s new mobile app will now make shopping a lot easier than what it used to be for so long. It has been devised to give customers access to their reward points by storing their loyalty cards in easy digital format. The CommBank mobile banking app foretells the future of a utopian shopping experience.

Loyalty cards nowadays are an inevitable and integral part of shopping at any store. Customers get reward points on their shopping, which can be redeemed after they have accumulated considerably. Carrying around a separate loyalty card has a number of drawbacks. First, it can be lost. Second, it can be left behind. And third, it might take a while to find it inside a purse, which can become a bit annoying if there is a long queue behind the paying customer. The CommBank mobile banking app, according to the News Corp report, has taken care of all these issues at once.

Customers of the Bank can simply scan the barcode of their physical loyalty cards, like Fly Buy, Country Road and Priceline, and save the copies on the app so that they can produce them at the store counters. Thus when the customers go for shopping next, they can have the barcode of the loyalty card scanned in order to add or redeem points and then proceed to pay by just tapping on their phone. The app is only available on android for the time being but a version for the iOS is underway.

“We are taking loyalty digital by making it easier for shoppers to have virtual copies of their loyalty cards on their mobiles. Even when they forget their cards they can still get their points via the CommBank app,” said Angus Sullivan, Executive General Manager of Retail Products and Strategy.

According to the Techly, the bank also announced its collaboration with the Westfield shopping centre. In this case, the customers will receive tailored offers, and the value of these offers will be based on their shopping behaviour.

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