The new membership scheme, which was launched last year, enables Co-op members to save and spend cash earned on own-brand purchases and also see their purchases support local charities of their choice. Co-op had announced that more than 5 million members would receive new membership cards and enjoy these enhanced benefits. It also noted that trials of these benefits had led to significant increases in transactions, turnover and the frequency of visits, along with a substantial jump in the sale of Co-op branded products.

“ACI is delighted to partner with Co-op on this new and innovative scheme. The Co-op, which has a store in every postal district in the UK, will be rewarding its members with a range of new benefits and services, some of which will directly support local charities and help them to better connect to the local community,” said Andrew Quartermaine, vice president, ACI Worldwide. “ACI’s UP Merchant Payments solution has the breadth and flexibility to support and integrate new services that go beyond traditional payments.”

In addition, ACI has started the production roll-out of its Point-2-Point Encryption (P2PE) card payments service across all Co-op UK food stores and fuel sites. P2PE is an emerging encryption technique that protects cardholder data by converting a consumer’s confidential credit and debit card data into indecipherable codes when the card is read by the payment terminal. It will help to considerably increase data security across all of Co-op’s UK food stores and fuel sites.

ACI will run all services for Co-op from its European data centre. Demand for ACI’s cloud-based payment solutions has grown considerably, and in response, ACI opened a new state-of-the art data centre in Limerick, Ireland last year.

ACI’s cloud-based UP payments solutions offer customers the highest levels of reliability, security and data privacy. They also have the flexibility to support new requirements should customers’ needs change over time.