I recently read the following question on Quora:

Is there any app that helps to store all your loyalty cards digitally?

I am looking for an app which is India based or atleast caters to the Indian market.

Someone once said that, on Quora, you answer the question that’s asked, the question that’s not asked, and the question that should be asked.

When I read this question, my first reaction was to wax eloquent about an Indian app that stores all loyalty cards in the world digitally. After doing a quick reality check, I felt that was a bit of wishful thinking and decided to restrict myself to the question that was asked.

Given below is a lightly edited version of my answer.

Like I’ve onboarded the loyalty card of the Indian QSR chain Mast Kalandar on my American KeyRing app.

From there on, whenever you’re shopping, you reach the checkout, fire up the app, select the said retailer’s card and flash your smartphone screen at the retailer’s POS machine (iOS Passport does all this automatically, probably based on LBS technology). If the retailer has the technology to scan the digital card off of your smartphone screen, you’d have extracted the full value from your mobile loyalty wallet. If not, you’d need to read out the card number manually and the checkout clerk would need to enter it manually into their POS system. In this case, you wouldn’t have used the full capability of your mobile loyalty wallet.

In the several years that I’ve been using KeyRing, I haven’t come across a single retailer in India who can scan the card from the smartphone. As a result, I’ve never been able to put my mobile loyalty wallet to full use in India.

This is not only true of KeyRing and Apple Wallet but also of all the Indian mobile loyalty wallets I’ve deleted.

Over time, the very mobile loyalty wallet category has lost its shine in India – thank God I didn’t invest in any of them! That’s because retailers have increasingly started using the customer’s mobile phone number as a proxy for the loyalty program member ID. While many retailers continue to issue plastic loyalty cards, that’s largely for branding purposes.

The way it works at many stores now, customers finish their shopping, reach checkout, and earn points by verbally quoting their mobile phone # to the billing clerk. There’s no need to show the plastic card and hence no need for a mobile loyalty wallet to earn points.

Many retailers also permit customers to redeem their points by speaking out their mobile phone # at checkout. So even redemption does not require the plastic card or mobile loyalty wallet. The few security-conscious retailers that insist on the plastic card for redemption won’t anyway be able to accept a mobile loyalty wallet because they can only scan the magstripe on the physical card.

Therefore, the usage frequency of plastic loyalty cards – and the value proposition of a mobile loyalty wallet – have dropped drastically in recent times in India.

People share their mobile phone numbers freely in India. Since the OP’s question pertained to India, I could conveniently assume that a retailer can get the customer’s mobile phone number and substitute it for loyalty program member ID.

In a global context, this assumption is not valid. Consumers don’t disclose their mobile phone numbers that freely in USA, UK and many other countries. Loyalty membership numbers embossed on plastic loyalty cards are still required to earn and redeem reward points – retailers can’t replace them so easily with mobile phone numbers. Ergo, the value proposition of mobile loyalty wallet is still intact in those markets.