Glory
Recycle. Reinvest. Reinvent.

There is no challenging the fact that ‘being digital’ seems to be the way ahead. The only question is: Can this predilection override our propensity, or to say dependence, toward tangible cash instruments anytime soon? The human trait of possessiveness and our consequent monetary-habits underline this contention like no other.

Even though cashless payments constituted 80 percent of transactions in the U.S. in as early as 2011,[1] paradoxically, almost 90 percent of shoppers still preferred carrying cash till as late as the second quarter of 2017.[2] A sense of—as high as 32 percent—safety during in-store purchasing is the reason, reports suggest.[3]

Incidentally, in in-store purchasing (retail environments in other words) cash usage is higher than plastic money. Regrettably though, despite such stimulating statistics, the retail sector is still failing to cash in on the opportunity as it possibly could. President of Glory (Americas), Chris Reagan construes the reason. “Retailers are trying to realize greater profitability by facilitating newer means of delivering customer service, while balancing labor productivity, in an effort to differentiate and compete in today’s omni-channel world. Every retailer and operator processes cash but often does not realize the amount of labor involved in the process. Additionally, as they deploy self-service kiosks, retailers and operators are realizing that they are alienating the significant group of customers who prefer to pay for transactions with cash.” Glory helps retailers find common ground between ‘conventional’ and ‘digital’ by integrating its CASHINFINITY line of retail automation solutions with customer operations, including kiosks, to enable cash acceptance at the point-of-sale and in back office processing. This, however, answers only a part of the complexities associated with hard cash.

Despite non-cash based transactions collectively scooping a large part of the pie, cash still commands a substantial share especially in retail environments where the volume of individual transactions are low. For example, cash accounts for approximately 28 percent of consumer preference while paying at coffee shops; debit cards account 23 percent and credit cards just 15.[3] This means that retailers still need to handle large volumes of bills and employ significant labor to hand-sort, hand-count, and disturbingly by today’s standards, even examine authenticity manually. Albeit this worked in yesteryears, today it translates into decreased productivity, avoidable losses in the form of payments to third-party service providers, and more importantly stagnation of idle cash that otherwise could have been reinvested in the business.

The platform can effectively provide a three-fold visibility into a retail business’s environment—from an individual device at each POS to a unified picture of all the POSs in a store and finally, a detailed projection of multiple stores combined that offers an enterprise level view.

At the backdrop of the product offerings, Reagan says, it is the company’s 4D approach, which ensures clients’ realization of return on investment. Every client engagement begins with the account managers and business consultants’ hard work to “Discover” the unique needs of the customers’ business objectives with the proposed deployment environment and analyzing each customer’s operations. Then the quest to “Design” initiates wherein the consultants perform a detailed investment analysis and map a solution with ROI unique for each customer. Then comes the time to “Deploy” in the form of a pilot project during which Glory’s full scope of professional services assist with project managers to oversee the seamless integration with client environment. Finally arrives the time to “Deliver” on the promises—training/change management teams help clients learn and adapt to the new system so that they can straightaway recognize the value of the solutions; Glory’s industry leading service teams service the customer and maintain the equipment, do break-fixes and timely upgrades. Reagan traces back to a customer, a membership-only warehouse club chain and provides figurative evidence of the methodology’s and CASHINFINITY’s value proposition. Post implementation, the customer drove seven and a half hours of labor cost out of their cash-room per store per day that accreted to around 1500 hours across all the stores. Automation and recycling curtailed the retailer’s idle cash sitting in store by a factor of 15 to 20 percent.

"Our equipment and software completely automate cash handling and digitize transactions that can move throughout the financial network to ultimately end up in a retailer's bank account"

While it is agreeable that digital money will eventually displace physical money, although not entirely, it is clear that cash will remain a strong contender for the foreseeable future as opposed to what digital proponents proselytize. This reality gives Glory a long runway to enable retailers to embrace digital transformation without missing out on the opportunity to tap into the preference of consumers that still attribute billions of dollars in revenue. “The best thing about our technology is that once it is implemented and deployed, it takes away the need for a dedicated team to handle and count cash. Retailers can forgo hiring someone able to count the bills accurately and instead hire somebody with even greater customer service skill-sets, and that definitely will impact the business in a positive way.”

References:
1 www.nasdaq.com/article/payment-method-statistics-cm487440
2 www.pcworld.com/article/3197399/application-development/what-s-next-in-payments-follow-the-trend.html
3 www.tsys.com/Assets/TSYS/downloads/rs_2016-us-consumer-payment-study.pdf