Smart Vending Machines Deliver On Data

Indonesian digital payments platform launches vending machines that engage with you

Vending machines are ubiquitous in Asia, selling everything from umbrellas to shirts and ties, hot drinks to whole coconuts. And the pace is picking up in Indonesia, a country with previously slower market penetration. Communities in Jakarta and other major cities are warming up to cashless vending machines, where payments are made via digital wallets. OVO, Indonesia’s leading digital payments, rewards, and financial services platform, recently revealed OVO SmartCube, the country’s first data-powered smart vending machine.

Supported by OVO’s robust digital ecosystem and integrated digital cashless payments, the machines deliver personalized consumer products and experiences. OVO SmartCube is designed to evaluate customer preferences using analytics powered by a machine learning-enabled recommendation engine, which makes product suggestions. OVO SmartCube can also provide instant assessments of when and what purchases take place, in order to offer relevant deals. The overarching goal is to develop more meaningful engagement with customers. 

The smart machines can be found at Lippo malls, universities, and selected offices. They are equipped to deliver integrated experiences such as touchscreen and gesture-based interactions, samples from partners, interactive video advertising, and cashless payment capabilities that create a unique channel to promote and distribute the products of participating brands, while offering customers a one-stop digital shopping experience.

OVO developed a system called Campaign Editor and CEP (Complex Event Processing – a real-time rules engine) to sit at the center of this OVO digital ecosystem, delivering data-driven marketing by analyzing all customer data as it comes in, to build profiles based on individual preferences that inform what partner brands offer. Campaign Editor in turn leverages the Kinetica Active Analytics Platform to retrieve information incredibly fast, producing 360-degree customer profiles and segmentation to generate targeted offers.

When customers process a transaction, OVO’s CEP correlates this new information (event) with the customer’s transaction history and other profile information stored inside the database. Then, based on the CEP rule calculation, the customer receives an immediate offer, such as dessert from the SmartCube, only twenty meters from the restaurant where they are having dinner, with incentive pricing. Alternatively, the customer may receive other merchant deals, only a stone’s throw away from their current location.

OVO SmartCube is built on Kinetica’s GPU-accelerated platform to combine streaming and historical data with location intelligence and machine learning-powered analytics, and leverages CEP, which is a method of synthesizing data from multiple sources so businesses can extract meaningful patterns or trends as data streams in that trigger automatic, real-time responses. With CEP, OVO can respond to customer opportunities in context: always present at the right time with the right message.

The task to collaborate and build customer-ready CEP in just six months from scratch, with a comprehensive analytics platform that supports the SmartCube and Campaign Editor, was a challenging and rewarding experience. With OVO SmartCube, the company is further underlining its data-centric innovation to better serve Indonesia, promoting financial inclusion across the nation.

These technologies offer a uniquely tailored, interactive shopping experience that caters to customers today. But the implications are far greater. This technology is also propelling society towards a digital, cashless future, putting Indonesia on the cutting edge and its consumers at the heart of the digital transformation taking place as a result of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Vira Shanty is OVO’s Chief Data Officer, responsible for the strategy, design, development, implementation, operation, and monetization of big data technology & use cases for OVO, supporting Lippo Group as a partner. OVO is a leading Indonesian payments, rewards, and financial services platform. This article was originally published in Forbes.