This article in Digital Trends describes PaidEasy’s effort to deploy a platform solution that will make it easy for consumers to discover, arrive at, order at, and pay for a range of services at hospitality and restaurant businesses:
“It’s hard to break into the mobile payments space. With industry standards like Square, Stripe, and Venmo, and relative newcomers with lots of industry clout like Apple Pay and Google Wallet, the sector seems all but saturated. But that hasn’t stoppedPaidEasy, which launches its all-in-one mobile payments app in the App Store today. Following what the company calls a “strong beta testing period in which more than 150 merchants have already joined the PaidEasy platform,” the new app is described as “the quickest way to discover merchants, search offers, and open and close bills.”
With a little help in the form of $2 million from private investor Ivor Ichikowitz, PaidEasy has its sights set on the hospitality industry, and particularly restaurants, it seems. By way of its innovative use of iBeacon technology, PaidEasy automatically opens a check whenever a user walks into a dining establishment. Then, the customer’s bill syncs with the merchant’s point-of-sale (POS) system, which allows waiters and waitresses to immediately add items to the bill without having to ask for a credit card at the end of the meal.
At the end, users can choose to split the bill, pay immediately via the app, or just leave altogether, knowing that the tab will close within 45 minutes (and include a tip). Better still, PaidEasy notes, “Customers can also leave feedback for merchants, allowing them to handle any review personally.”According to the company, this system creates “not only a frictionless payment process, but a flawless transaction for the merchant as well,” so everyone wins all the time. And while the app notes that there are other mobile payment systems that have attempted to achieve the same end result, allowing users to split tabs and tip via their smartphones, PaidEasy believes that its full-stack coverage makes it the most versatile platform available.”
Given the chicken or the egg problems associated with starting a platform solution it will be hard for PaidEasy to establish critical mass, but the company has identified
“And indeed, there are a number of key differentiators that set PaidEasy apart from the crowd. For one, its “proprietary technology has made it possible for merchants to integrate their POS with PaidEasy and reduce CC fees to 1.9 percent,” and also requires no additional hardware (unlike say, Square, which requires the purchase of a card reader).
Moreover, PaidEasy allows for table management, giving restaurants the ability to address walk-ins and cut down on table turnover, as well integration with Uber, Yelp, and Apple Pay, which helps customers get to the restaurant, determine what they want to order, and pay ‘on their own terms.’ And because customers are able to view their bill at any time with PaidEasy, there’s full transparency at every step of the way. But don’t worry — even with all this visibility, PaidEasy is secure, ‘encrypting the user’s credit cards within the app so payments details are tokenized and never shared with the merchant.’ ”
In large part PayEasy’s success will depend on how easily the solution can be integrated into the technology and business processes that already exist within the businesses interested in participating within the PayEasy ecosystem. If businesses don’t flock to the platform, neither will consumers
Overview by Tim Sloane,VP, Payments Innovation at Mercator Advisory Group
Read the full story here.