Catuity, Visa USA, Visa International and Welcome Real-Time have announced they have entered into a patent cross-license agreement.
Under the Visa Loyalty Program Patent Agreement, Catuity, Visa and Welcome will cross license existing and future patents for Visa smart loyalty programs. This cross license will be worldwide and royalty-free until the last patent expires. The cross license will extend to all Visa affiliates, members and merchants. Participants will develop and promote interoperable loyalty solutions by integrating the Visa interoperability toolkits within their platforms. These toolkits, demonstrated by Visa, Welcome and Catuity during Cartes 2002, allow cards with one technology to be used in terminals connected to a different loyalty platform, and for data from different loyalty processing centers to be aggregated to enable customer service activities.