The consumer exchange concept has been extensively validated. Financial institutions have made major investments to enter this emerging market. CITICORP, for example, invested $200 million in a pilot project to collect such data from grocery stores. The project failed, not because the data was not valuable, but because the system CITICORP used to collect data slowed-up grocery store checkout lanes. (Slowing-down a grocery checkout lane is fatal. It’s like slowing down the order desk in a brokerage firm or slowing down the 911 switchboard in a police station.)

MicroNEX’s “collection system” (CRISP), by contrast, accelerates grocery checkout instead of slowing it down and comes with built-in features which improve grocery store operations.