Australian shoppers aren't impressed with their consumer rewards. Wallets are bursting with loyalty cards that mean little to anyone. An emerging standard in loyalty programs may break this trend in a move away from proprietary loyalty schemes to a single card with multiple rewards. In effect, multiple rewards programs from different stores rolled into one.

In producing its consolidated rewards package, Sydney based company MazeCard has drawn inspiration from the humble credit card. During the first half of the 20th century, each merchant would offer their own store credit to their customers. You'd be lucky to get a credit, and at terms suitable for the merchant. Then in 1950, the first consolidated credit system - Diners Club - began to emerge. Drawing parallels to the upbringing of a modern credit system, a rewards program is akin to a store credit - it has long been crying out for an overhaul. And this has finally happened.

MazeCard is an electronic network that links one card to every loyalty program that a customer is a part of. A customer can walk into any participating shop, boutique, cafe, grocer or restaurant, swipe their MazeCard and automatically sign up to the merchant's loyalty program without filling out a single form. One card that's always in your wallet is harder to misplace then a stack of punch cards that each of us has lying around. To draw an analogy, existing loyalty cards are like cash. Losing a card means waving goodbye to your hard-earned points. But when our rewards have been "digitised", losing a card is no longer the end of the world - it can be replaced and all points restored.

While the potential of this technology is far-reaching, the underlying principles are surprisingly simple. A card is issued to a customer with a unique QR (Quick Response) code printed on it. This code uniquely identifies a customer in a secure database maintained by MazeCard. The shop owner scans the QR code on the customer's card using a smartphone, which immediately credits their account with points. When enough points are accrued, they can be redeemed in the store.

Most consumers are becoming increasingly concerned with climate change and conscious of environmental sustainability. Even those living under a rock will soon wake up to the carbon tax - a measure we are told that pays for our carbon sins. So given their inherent reliance on cardboard or plastic, traditional loyalty programs are no more sustainable than junk mail. A single card certainly solves the problem to an extent, but the ultimate solution would be to completely eliminate plastic from our lives. And as it turns out, if you are one of the 12.2 million smartphone users in Australia (as predicted by a Telco research company Telsyte), you may be able to give plastic the boot. MazeCard allows you to carry a "virtual" card on your phone, and have the merchant scan your phone instead.

This technology could not have arrived at a better time for owners of small and medium size businesses in Australia. According to Dun and Bradstreet in their latest Business Failures and Start-ups Analysis (Feb 2012), the number of small businesses that went bankrupt over the last 12 months has jumped by 48%, with an average annual growth in bankruptcies of 30% over the last 3 years. These figures don't require much convincing; where small businesses were traditionally outgunned by large franchises and supermarket chains, the emergence of online stores has added the proverbial fuel to the blaze. A consolidation of rewards programs could see a much needed swing back towards customer loyalty and the strengthening of the small-to-medium business sector.

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