Universal Smart Cards recently partnered with the World Yoga Festival for this year’s celebrations at Beale Park, Reading between 6th and 9th June 2017 to implement a revolutionary digital cash system - Universal Cash. This allowed a selected handful of guests and staff to trial this solution at the World Yoga Festival, enabling them to pay for their food and drink at selected traders using their pre-loaded card in an offline environment using a simple mobile phone as a merchant terminal.

Universal Cash offers benefits including greater control for the event organiser, increased profits for the merchant and a quicker and more convenient way to pay for the customer. At the World Yoga festival event organisers were able to able to encourage an increased turnover for vendors by allowing volunteers to make food and drink purchases using their cards. It also allowed vendors to reduce their credit & debit card merchant fees. Consumers & volunteers felt more secure as they didn’t have the worry about carrying cash. All of these points demonstrate Universal Cash really is a revolutionary payent system for festivals and events.

This complete system allows consumers to load a selected value from a bank account or credit/debit card from home or at the selected event location onto a contactless smart card or wristband. There is also the ability to use the NFC smartphone based merchants off-line which means there is no disruption in taking transactions in the event of mobile network outage or unavailability.

Ramanuj Banerjee, the Co-Founder World Yoga Festival said “At the World Yoga Festival 2017 we required a simple payment system for our guests, volunteers and staff (around 200 people) to obtain food & beverages at 9 onsite independent food vendors. The system had to be able to make transactions offline since mobile coverage on site was patchy. Universal Smart Cards (USC) provided the 'Universal Cash' cards capable of being topped up with funds on site as required by authorised staff. The system uses generic NFC mobile phones (also supplied by USC) as merchant terminals and load stations. The system worked a treat with users and merchants reporting both ease and speed of use. At the end of the 3-day festival, all redemptions made by merchants were totalled together and the merchants paid by direct bank transfer.

We were able to monitor costs, even down to individual transactions. Many merchants asked why such a system was not available at other festivals. We had limited ATM facilities on site and this limited cash expenditure by festival goers with merchants that did not accept bank cards. We have therefore decided to enlarge the system next year for all festival goers by enabling all merchants with terminals. We expect this to increase turnover for our merchants.

The Universal Cash system is easy to deploy and easy to use. If you are using papers coupons and vouchers you need to understand the greater convenience and control possible through the Universal Cash system being offered by Universal Smart Cards.”

If this is a solution that you’re interested in or would like to receive more information, then please contact us on +44 (0)333 700 0078 or email sales@usmartcards.com