Retailers can grow their sales using always-on connections with global travelers that facilitate inter-app promotions, communications and value-added services.
BARCELONA, SPAIN- iFREE Group – a global leader in e-commerce and connectivity for travelers – and Veea Inc. – a global leader in Smart Retail solutions – announced a strategic partnership. In this partnership, Veea will provide its smart retail solutions, including its iOS and Android-based mobile app capabilities along with Point of Sale (POS) applications and most forms of payments and payment gateway services, to iFREE Group for its Travelutionary solutions. iFREE Group will provide Veea with its OTT "roaming-free" solutions as well as multi-IMSI multi-supplier e-sim solutions for its VeeaHub platform services currently supporting a range of applications for Smart Retail, Smart Transportation and Smart City. Furthermore, iFREE Group and Veea will integrate their merchant ecosystems to benefit from each other's customers and channels.
iFREE Group works with leading airlines, hotels and clubs, as well as credit card, insurance and payment companies in offering travel products and "roaming-free" telecom services, available to over one billion travelers with an addressable market valued at over US$3 trillion. iFREE's OTT app offers a portal for insurance services, global payments, travel bookings, telecommunication services and social media supported by a loyalty program that incorporates coupons and travel merchandise.
By joining forces with Veea, iFREE app users traveling the globe will be able to search and discover hundreds of millions of:
- retail shops, restaurants, bars, clubs, coffee shops, entertainment places, pharmacies, and many other types of merchants;
- professional services such as doctors, dentists, clinics, hospitals, lawyers, religious services, wedding chapels, and most other professional services;
- government offices, embassies, police stations, etc.;
- sightseeing and public places such as museums, historical sites, monuments, parks, landmarks, etc.; and many more types of establishments.
Travelers can use a mobile app developed for iOS and Android devices, with combined capabilities of iFREE/Veea platforms, to communicate with iFREE's network of merchants on the VeeaConnect app to query product availability or pricing, make routine or geofenced virtual reservations, receive contextual coupons, respond to personally relevant promotions, make Card-Not-Present (CNP) payments without a payment terminal, and take advantage of many other features of the app. Travelers can also benefit from and contribute to crowd-sourced data available for the establishments with Chip-Ins, which are user or merchant generated ephemeral updates such as venue photos, videos, wait times, crowd levels, ratings, etc. Moreover, iFREE's smart digital travel assistant provides for speech recognition and natural language understanding for translation, voice to text blog, search, discovery and podcasts for travelers' points of interest.
For Smart Retail applications, Veea has developed an innovative platform, with POS and payment solutions including payment gateway services, that connects retailers to their current and potential customers through a variety of engagements and new forms of communication. Veea solutions include an intelligent wireless edge server product called VeeaHub with an App Store for applications developed by Veea and third-party app developers who can take advantage of VeeaHub's open software development environment. VeeaHub provides for private and public access WiFi and IoT service management, always-on managed access with automatic failover with multiple backhaul services including an optional 4G backhaul, staff and customer communications, proximal advertising, security applications with event reporting such as for streaming security cameras, expanded omnichannel operations, and other applications. Additionally, Veea offers an SDK with APIs to major retailers that prefer to use their own mobile app instead of the Veea consumer app. Veea's retail solutions augment the real world, providing seamless in- and out-of-store experiences that lets merchants engage and retain customers through the use of data analytics supported by machine learning and AI. Veea will be demonstrating VeeaHub platform and a range of its applications at Mobile World Congress 2018, in Hall 8.0 booth F31, 26 February thru 1 March 2018.
In signing this agreement, iFREE Group Chairman Steven Loke comments, "Veea has the most innovative retail solutions in the industry. Their social commerce platform and merchant ecosystem perfectly complement iFREE Group's platform. iFREE Group will be able to bring on board merchants from throughout Asia and hundreds of millions of travelers to leverage Veea solutions. We are also very pleased to provide our 5G-enabled multi-IMSI multi-supplier e-SIM solutions to Veea for its industry leading-edge IoT hub solution with every form of connectivity and wide range of applications."
Veea Chairman Allen Salmasi adds: "We are thrilled about our partnership with iFREE Group, focusing on Smart Retail solutions, which will introduce millions of travelers to the huge benefits available from over 350 million merchants who can service them through the VeeaConnect app. iFREE Group will strengthen our merchant ecosystem in Asia and will bring along a travel focused loyalty, couponing, discounted merchandise and telecom service offering, with a range of global 4G and WiFi hotspot services (iSpot), an exciting new and powerful platform for global advertising (iAds) as well as a wide range of other curated services developed by iFREE that we will be offering through our partnership at scale throughout the world."
Tatiana is the news coordinator for TravelDailyNews Media Network (traveldailynews.gr, traveldailynews.com and traveldailynews.asia). Her role includes monitoring the hundreds of news sources of TravelDailyNews Media Network and skimming the most important according to our strategy.
She holds a Bachelor's degree in Communication & Mass Media from Panteion University of Political & Social Studies of Athens and she has been editor and editor-in-chief in various economic magazines and newspapers.
