Payments and transactional services business Worldline has entered into a co-development partnership with Hease Robotics, a French B2B service robot manufacturer, delivering interaction-oriented robots to the retail and hospitality industries.
The two companies signed an agreement to enable extended services on customer-facing robots in public places like malls, shops, entertainment locations, events locations, and transport stations.
In this co-development relationship, Worldline will bring to Heasy, the first robot designed for the retail industry by Hease Robotics, state-of-the-art technologies and industrial end-to-end services such as payment, including all current and future payment methods, people detection, mood detection, voice detection, new user experiences, next-gen authentication as well as security and connected device management.
“We are extremely proud that Worldline choose Hease Robotics to work on the future of interactions in the retail and hospitality industries.” said Max Vallet, CEO of Hease Robotics, following their announcement at CES 2017. “We want to bring the most advanced robotics services to the market, meaning working with the best technology actor in the world. Worldline will bring their technology as well as their experience to Heasy, our retail-oriented robot.”
With the digital revolution and technological advancements come new innovative types of users interactions through new interfaces and new devices which must be autonomous, context-based, and multichannel in order to accompany customers and sellers in stores. These new interfaces, such as Heasy, aim to welcome customers with warmth, provide them with information, help and suggestions but also entertain them.
Nicolas Kozakiewicz, Worldline head of Research & Development and Innovation: “Working with partners brings the ability to mix and match what each party does better than the others. Working with Hease Robotics is a perfect case for completing many of our transaction-based services like payment, image recognition, natural interaction…“
Worldline already has an extensive experience in the retail industry, with solutions for ordering and payments, with interactive kiosks in hotel lobbies, public places and transport stations, with intelligent connected cars that manage fuel and insurance for its users, with connected piggy banks that transform the ‘analog’ coin-based piggybank with a fully NFC-enabled account managing device, to name a few.
