Istanbul's Garanti Bank is to distribute 750,000 multi-application Gemplus smart cards to its retail customer base. The new Bonus Card, which will enable cardholders to accumulate and redeem points for instore purchasing at participating merchants, is the first combined payment and loyalty card in Turkey to use chip technology.
The bank has contracted with Hypercom for an initial 2500 ePic ICE 5000 card payment terminals for deployment at merchant sites around the country. The terminals will run a custom Hypercom application developed specifically for this project, as well as a traditional bank credit/debit application.
Cardholders will be able to view and redeem their stored loyalty points towards full payment or discounts when they shop with nominated merchants. The anchor merchants are Yeni Karamursel, a leading department store and Tansas supermarket chains.