Unified loyalty cards

Last weeks we study the following issue – why unified loyalty cards did not get widespread adoption. What we mean by unified loyalty card? It’s a card that gets accepted in every store like store’s own card. Advantages are evident – small merchants do not need to issue their own cards, larger enterprises will get a card that is a duplicate of their own one. If such card exists producers will be able to get a lot of sales analytics. All the complexities preventing widespread adoption are technical (i.e. solvable). According to interviewed experts the problem is only in “bootstrapping” such a program, involving several major retailers and attracting vendors of equipment (POS terminal, RMS, software). Despite the number of obstacles we get an impression that the thing is doable.