Canadian startup Glance Pay, launched last year, looks well placed to bring fresh impetus to the fintech market, with its innovative new mobile payment app.
It seems strange to recall the days when we had to make a trip to the bank to transfer nominal sums or check our balances. Technical advancements, and the necessary security improvements that came with them, mean that we can now move money as easily we might message a friend. Even comparatively slow passwords are being replaced with near-instant biometrics.
The fintech space aims to combine the best financial products and services with the latest technologies – typically aiding payment and transfer, lending and financing, or banking and financial management. The companies that do this best recognise the ways online and mobile can best traditional models for convenience and speed. Their solutions are simple to use but transformative. Paypal is the epitome of this.
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IoT in finance
There’s a deep vein of opportunity for innovative companies to find their niche in a world where most of us carry out financial interactions multiple times a day. Glance Pay spotted one such prospect in mobile restaurant payments. It is now the biggest mobile payment app in Canada, claiming 92 percent of restaurant payment app downloads.
Their app allows customers to use their smartphone for one click payments and tab splitting, but the startup has also built a whole ecosystem around this. Other services include in-app marketing, in-store rewards and help choosing nearby restaurants.
Glance Pay developed its own proprietary GPS and image identification technology to quickly locate you – allowing users to select and pay their bill without the lengthy wait that often comes with trying to flag down busy staff.
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Joint enterprise
The app’s success is largely due to its wide adoption by restaurants throughout Canada, making its installation a much more appealing proposition to customers. With the time savings and revenue boosts it offers restaurants, it’s a win-win situation.
The company has partnered with 160 merchants – a number that will continue to grow exponentially as it expands across North America, evidenced by the fact that Q2 revenue is up 664% over the previous quarter.
As if Glance Pay’s forward-thinking, opportunistic approach was in doubt, they are also preparing to capitalise on the upcoming legalization of recreational cannabis use in Canada – a market that a Deloitte report last year estimated could be worth $22.6 billion annually. They’re planning to facilitate rapid turnaround for vendors and one-click payments for customers.
Glance Pay’s holistic approach of creating whole ecosystems around a simple payment process could see them expand their footprint across several industries. When you consider the initial impact of this method, alongside their patented location technology and early market advantage, they have every chance of global success.
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