Catuity Expands Market For Loyalty Programs To Include Mass Merchandisers, Supermarkets And Quick Service Restaurants.

Business Editors

DETROIT--(BUSINESS WIRE)--July 13, 2001

Catuity Develops Open Program Engine for Multi-Lane Merchants

Catuity, Inc. (NASDAQ: CTTY; ASX: CAT) today released a new version of its product, the Catuity Open Program Engine (OPE) that will enhance its loyalty software solutions to mass merchandisers, supermarkets and quick service restaurants.

The OPE is a store-based loyalty engine that enables large retailers with multi-lane checkout operations to easily, efficiently and inexpensively integrate loyalty into the payment stream. The OPE is specifically designed to integrate into existing POS environments as well as with new point of sale terminals featuring smart card readers, larger screens and signature capability.

Michael V. Howe, President of Catuity, made the announcement. "This development strengthens Catuity's position as the recognized U.S. leader in next generation loyalty software solutions. The new Catuity release operates on both magnetic stripe cards and smart cards. With the OPE, mass merchandisers, supermarkets and quick service restaurants can benefit from Catuity's payment integrated loyalty programs by building a history of a customer's buying habits and then rewarding and recognizing that individual customer directly at the time of transaction."

Howe added "recognizing best customer purchase behavior and rewarding individual customers accordingly has become easier than ever for merchants with our front-end software system. Our system allows multi-lane merchants, who have millions of customers, to install our system and to begin accumulating information and delivering loyalty rewards to new and regular customers at the time of payment."

The enhancement of the multi-lane market segment opens up tremendous potential for Catuity, as evidenced by the recent announcement from the International Mass Retail Association, which indicated that mass retailers are drawing sales from other chain stores at a rate of three out of four dollars spent in mass retail stores during the first quarter of 2001. "With the introduction of OPE, we can aggressively target these markets together with transaction processors and others who already service these merchants," said Howe.

Catuity accelerated development of this application in response to requests from its customer base. "Although we always planned to incorporate efficient multi-lane capabilities to our software, we found that the customer base requesting these tools was significantly interested in our product and services and as a result, we moved forward our development and introduction of these applications," Howe said.

Catuity, Inc. (www.catuity.com) is a leading provider of loyalty software systems. The Catuity software includes an integrated suite of applications that provide loyalty, ticketing, access control, and membership. The Catuity Loyalty System is ubiquitous in that it can operate on any device, any card program, and with any payment process, including stored value, smart cards and wireless applications. Catuity unites the brick-and-mortar retailer with the Internet to enable cross-sell capabilities with consistent brand imaging across all channels. The Catuity loyalty system is currently the only loyalty software approved by Visa USA for use by its member banks that issue smart cards with loyalty applications.

In conjunction with the provisions of the "Safe Harbor" section of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, this release may contain forward-looking statements pertaining to future anticipated projected plans, performance and developments, as well as other statements relating to future operations. All such forward-looking statements are necessarily only estimates of future results and there can be no assurance that actual results will not materially differ from expectations. Further information on potential factors that could affect Catuity, Inc. is included in the Company's Form 10-K, which is filed with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission.