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News / 29 August 2017

Cone-tactless!


Taking Mr Whippy into the 21st Century, with contactless payment.

The iconic 99. Symbol of summer and sugar-hyped children. But oh, the queues. The endless queues of people scrabbling in their pockets for change.

These queues are the reason that ice-cream vans were voted in the top ten services Brits would like to see become contactless-enabled.

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of contactless payments in the UK, Barclaycard decided to make this queue-less dream come true. And their communications agency, Cohn & Wolfe, asked us to work the same technical whiz-kiddery we had for the contactless beer pump.

We connected a Carpigiani ice-cream machine to a Payworks contactless reader, via our custom touchscreen interface. A new fascia and some heavy lifting later, our 21st Century ice-cream van was ready to go. Pay and pour your own ice-cream within 60 seconds, and wave goodbye to the sweaty, hungry queuers.