Pennies and K3 Retail provide prestigious tailor with electronic charity box for customers in its store

Gieves & Hawkes, one of Savile Row’s most prestigious tailors, has adopted the Pennies electronic charity box to enable easy digital charitable donations instore, with the help of K3 Retail.

Mark Henderson, Chairman of Gieves & Hawkes and Trustee of the charity Queen Elizabeth Scholarship Trust (QEST), which funds craftsmen and women to help further their careers, selected Pennies as the donation method of choice, deciding that the system provided the best way to donate in a secure and simple manner.

Building in charitable giving at PoS

To enable donations in its store, K3 Retail gained Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) accreditation and then bridged the gap between its electronic file transfer (EFT) payments hardware and the LS Retail point-of-sale (PoS) software built on the Microsoft Dynamics NAV enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform, to provide integration between business systems and enable the Pennies functionality. The retailer is now able to use the digital micro-donations system, which discretely displays an option for the consumer to provide a small donation, on the PIN pad at the point of purchase.

Henderson stated: “K3 Retail kindly completed this project as a gesture of goodwill and we are thrilled with the results. The Pennies system is something that Gieves & Hawkes has wanted in place for some time now and K3 has made it possible. Now the system is up and running we can raise funds for a variety of charities including QEST, a charity close to my own heart.”

Maximising transaction consistency

In the near future Gieves & Hawkes will also benefit from a reconciliation report from K3 Retail, to help balance transactional statements and generate a periodic remittance back to Pennies. This will be compared to figures provided by their EFT payments provider to ensure consistency of transactions across the retail estate.

This project has also enabled K3 Retail to incorporate the Pennies charitable functionality into its core Microsoft Dynamics system, which will now be rolled out as part of the K3 master product. All existing clients will have the choice of opting into the service and new clients will automatically receive the functionality.