Perhaps this and other franchise-wide technological integrations will work to increase the restaurant’s declining foot traffic. McDonald’s domestic same-store sales were down 1.3 percent year over year in 2016. The number of customers that McDonald’s draws has reportedly been dropping every year for the past four, falling 2.1 percent in 2016.

All told, it adds up to a 10.4 percent drop in foot traffic since 2011. Further still, all-day breakfast numbers might actually have been obscuring a greater loss in customer numbers. Some estimates peg a 12.5–13.5 percent decrease in foot traffic for lunch and dinner crowds.

In addition to mobile ordering and delivery, McDonald’s is upping its in-store technology and planning to add self-service kiosk ordering, digital smart menu boards, custom-order options and even table service. It’s working toward rolling out these technology upgrades in all of its worldwide locations by the end of 2018.

For now, we’ll have to wait and see if the boost in technology will translate to a boost in consumer interest. There’s certainly precedent for this across the retail industry, as more and more consumers vie for in-store tech.

Despite slumping numbers on the foot traffic front, the company posted some decent fourth quarter numbers. McDonald’s reported at the end of January that it saw $6.03 billion in revenue in Q4, beating Wall Street estimates, though down 5 percent year over year. Annual revenue for McDonald’s reached $24.6 billion, down 3 percent year over year, while net income rose 3 percent to $4.69 billion.

First appeared at PYMNTS

The post McDonald’s Mobile Ordering Across U.S. By 2018 appeared first on FinTech Ranking.

Amazon and Google aren’t the only ones who own the AI virtual assistant space. Domino’s Pizza Enterprises has just made a move to up their digital ordering game, starting in Australia and New Zealand.

The restaurant franchise recently announced a partnership with voice and language solutions provider Nuance Communications based in Burlington, Mass. The two worked to create DRU Assist, a multichannel virtual assistant based on Nuance’s Nina virtual assistant engine but tailored to fit the Domino’s brand.

DRU Assist uses conversational AI on Domino’s mobile app and website in Australia and New Zealand to deliver virtual online ordering and other customer service functions. Additionally, DRU Assist is able to hold digital conversations with customers about menus, ingredients, store locations and operating hours.

“Domino’s is already a recognized industry leader in digital innovation,” said Robert Schwarz, managing director for Nuance Enterprise in Australia and New Zealand. “Through our partnership, we collaborated with Domino’s to deliver a tailored, first-to-market solution that supports the brand and is on the cutting edge of innovation.”

DRU Assist’s conversational AI capabilities are reportedly able to deliver faster results compared to point-and-click interfaces used in online ordering websites. The virtual assistant was also built with the scalability to allow for expansion across Domino’s other regions worldwide supported by global cloud technologies.

Trained virtual assistants from Virtual Coworker give you the confidence to delegate specialized tasks without having to worry about the quality of work.

Group CEO and Managing Director of Domino’s Pizza Enterprises, Don Meij said, “Our partnership with Nuance Communications has not only enabled us to continue on our digital journey, but it has also allowed us to deliver an easy and seamless ordering experience for our customers.”

Domino’s has a history of innovating with ordering technology. The company also recently rolled out the ability to order from the full menu on Facebook Messenger. While the restaurant franchise has had an order bot in Messenger since September, it wasn’t until last month that users had full access to every item. Hungry customers are also able to order via Amazon Echo or from the restaurant’s mobile app and website.

First appeared at PYMNTS

The post Domino’s Gets Its Own Virtual Assistant appeared first on FinTech Ranking.

Starbucks Corp.’s much-ballyhooed mobile-ordering system has brought a painful side effect to the coffee giant: traffic jams at the pickup counter.

Because customers are now able to order and pay for coffee via their phones, many of them now head directly to the part of the cafe where beverages are handed out. That’s created pileups at Starbucks and frustrated some customers enough that they’ve canceled their orders, said Chief Operating Officer Kevin Johnson.

“The use of mobile order and pay continues to accelerate,” Johnson said in an interview. “That’s created congestion at the handoff.”

The snags hurt U.S. sales in the first quarter, contributing to disappointing results for the world’s largest coffee chain. But the company has been working to correct the problem, Johnson said.

The stakes of getting the process right are high for Starbucks, which now generates 27 percent of its U.S. sales via mobile payments. The company is counting on the system to help attract customers and speed them through its stores. Johnson, a veteran of Microsoft Corp. and Juniper Networks Inc., is ascending to the chief executive officer job in April — a move seen as solidifying Starbucks’ tech ambitions.

Starbucks also cited a broader restaurant slump for creating a “challenging environment” last quarter. The company reined in its forecast for the full year, saying revenue will rise between 8 percent and 10 percent. It had previously predicted a double-digit increase.

The stock fell as much as 4.8 percent to $55.65 in New York on Friday after the results were released. Before the drop, Starbucks’ shares had increased 5.3 percent this year, outpacing the 2.6 percent gain of the S&P 500 Index.

Johnson is taking the reins from Howard Schultz, who served two stints as CEO and built Starbucks into a global coffee empire. Johnson inherits a company with “outsized expectations” for performance, said Jennifer Bartashus, an analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. Against that backdrop, the company’s 3 percent same-store sales growth last quarter wasn’t good enough.

“In the realm of restaurants in general, 3 percent is not a bad result,” she said. “But Starbucks is considered more of a premium brand. There was an expectation that they would be slightly higher.”

First appeared at Payments source

The post Starbucks mobile orders bring traffic jams to the pickup counter appeared first on FinTech Ranking.

PaidUp is the story of a journalist who came to the Philippines to do a feature on social entrepreneurs; Eventually, he became an entrepreneur himself

UK-born journalist Asim Haneef had heard a great deal about the Philippines, and the stories always fascinated him. With over 100 million people, over 1.2 million small and medium enterprises (SMEs), high consumer culture, and an ever-increasing middle class, the country that he had heard about was a kind of wonderland of opportunities for him.

His intuition proved true when he arrived in the Philippines in 2015 to assess the feasibility of making a local version of a TV show about social entrepreneurs, which he had produced in Egypt.

“With widespread mobile phone usage and growth, prepaid card culture, and high percentage of young English-speaking population who are usually less technophobic and open to new tech products, I knew the Philippines offered vast opportunities for people like me, who have nursed an ambition to become a social entrepreneur one day,” said Asim, who has worked with leading TV channels like Al Jazeera in the past, as he spoke to me over the phone.

PaidUp Founder Asim Haneef

“It is a unique place in some sense: It has obvious poverty, inequality and entrenched challenges, but at the same time it has some of the most friendly, warm, honest, dedicated, optimistic and joyous people,” he added.

Haneef, however, realised that as a journalist, he had limitations in creating a practical impact on the people of the country. So he wanted to get into the habit of building things, not tearing things down — like some media publications do.

And that’s when he decided to delve into entrepreneurship.

“Building a tech company is something I had very little choice in, actually. I knew I wanted to create tools, change systems, test products, harness technology — so it sort of logically followed that I had to start somewhere. I wanted to build a valuable service that helps customers and businesses in different ways,” he said, as he narrated his lonely startup journey.

And fintech was his obvious choice, given the perfect blend of SMEs and a huge mobile phone population. “I believed in the great revolution of cash, which is inherently flawed and an expensive system. I think in future, people will be surprised that we carried metal and paper in our pockets and exchanged it with each other — just like music, and media and so much else. The future is cashless, money will be digital and mobile. We’ll use our phones to not just browse and text each other but pay for everything too. It feels inevitable to me,” Asim said.

PaidUp pays off

Haneef came up with the idea for his product, PaidUp, during his travels over the past few years working in the media as a TV producer, most recently in Egypt. At one point, he was making a reality TV show for social change, which focused on young social entrepreneurs in the Middle East. “I could see that small businesses were in need of new solutions to their challenges, and I then had an idea: What if there was a a service that enabled these SMEs to bypass the banks/conventional lending institutions and crowdfund working capital directly from their customers?”

Launched in November 2015, PaidUp is a mobile app that turns your phone into a prepaid digital wallet, enabling you to find, order and instantly pay for food, drinks and services ahead of time as conveniently as sending a text message.

For example, with the app, you can select a store, choose your lunch whilst still in the office, set a time, and have everything ready, cooked and prepared the moment you arrive — no standing in line, no waiting around and no need to bring any cash. Just the simple convenience of ordering your food in a few seconds.

“The app seeks to eliminate carrying cash by letting you pre-pay upfront and then letting you order on-the-go from your favourite stores before you arrive. So if you feel like having a coffee and you’re 10-mins walk away, simply choose your drink, select the time you’d like to pick-up — and your drink will be ready the moment you arrive,” he said as he explained the working model.

Asim claims PaidUp is the ‘Uber for food’, because of the way it lets customers order on the go.

The app also acts as a loyalty app by enabling customers to be rewarded for buying pre-paid credit from their favourite stores. For instance, you can load PhP 500 (around US$10) at a restaurant, and you’ll get PhP 600 (around US$12) added to your wallet — a free 100 peso (US$2) reward simply for paying upfront through the app. Every partner store offers free rewards for customers that pay upfront.

On the merchant/business side, the app enables micro-entrepreneurs and SMEs in developing countries to bypass banks and ‘crowd-fund’ working capital from their regular customers. PaidUp’s long-term plan is to help SMEs gain access to low interest credit by beginning to create a data history and credit scoring mechanism for the millions of businesses in Asia.

SMEs, the backbone with zero backing

“Enabling the growth and success of SMEs across emerging markets is, in my opinion, one of the most important things necessary to reduce global inequality, create more jobs and increase sustainable, inclusive economic growth for all,” Haneef told e27.

“Despite being well-recognised as the backbone of most economies and accounting for most of the jobs and GDP in developing countries, SMEs have tremendous, unfair disadvantages preventing them from growing and competing with the 1 per cent of biggest companies, namely getting access to affordable credit, leveraging technology and reaching new markets,” he continued.

As of today, 100-plus businesses in the food, drinks, coffee, hair & nail salons, beauty & wellness and spas have signed up with PaidUp. Currently, over 5,000 customers use the app.

With a single office in Manila, PaidUp now plans to expand into Singapore and India in 2017.

PaidUp is getting lots of interest for its disruptive product for angel investment, but Haneef is waiting for the right partner to come along. “We just made it to the final 25 in the new Singapore-based startup competition with a bunch of other companies. I believe we are the only one from the Philippines, all others are in India or Singapore — so it’s a great sign for us to be in the competition with them.”

It was also one of the eight top-tier startups that rocked Seedstars Manila in May this year.

Develop a ‘rhino skin’

Haneef believes building the company is the hardest thing he has ever done, but it’s also a tremendous blessing. “Nobody really knows what they’re doing until they are doing it — there’s a lot of advice and hype in startup world, I try my best to ignore the noise and just focus on making a service I can be proud of,” he said.

“You have to believe in yourself, trust your instincts, get hands-on, spend as little money as possible, don’t over-engineer product without validation and demand, think big, stay close to customers, be kind and don’t give up,” he said on being asked about the learning he has made.

“I often tell people that you have to develop rhinoceros skin, so that rejection doesn’t affect you since when you’re building something new like this, it’s expected to get rejected 100x a day and it’s important not to take it personally, — just keep going and stay positive above all else! Believe in the mission, yourself and your team — always remember it’s a blessing to be starting your own company. Despite the painful long hours and sacrifices, we are the lucky ones,” Asim concluded.

First appeared at e27

The post PaidUp helps Philippine SMEs crowdfund working capital from customers appeared first on FinTech Ranking.

Issuers of prepaid cards often say their products are a good tool for budgeting, but it’s rarer to hear merchants market their own branded prepaid cards this way.

Walmart is retooling its prepaid strategy to focus on saving in an effort to improve the financial habits of its customers.

“We’re using our size and scale to take on issues impacting our customers,” said Daniel Eckert, senior vice president of services for Walmart U.S. during a press conference to publicly unveil Prize Savings, a prize-linked savings incentive program available to Walmart MoneyCard holders.

Eckert made reference to a “savings crisis,” citing Federal Reserve stats saying nearly half of all U.S. families can’t cover a $400 emergency with their savings. “Ninety percent of Americans are within 15 miles of a Walmart; this is a meaningful way to help Americans contribute to their rainy day fund.”

To participate, consumers log into the Walmart MoneyCard app or website to transfer funds from their Walmart MoneyCard balance into a linked MoneyCard Vault, which stores savings. Each dollar equals one entry in that month’s national drawing, and the sweepstakes awards 500 cash prizes each month, averaging $25 each but including a $1,000 grand prize. The cash prizes are deposited into the winner’s MoneyCard account.

The program was announced on Thursday, but has been active since August. The retailer did not say exactly how many people have participated in the sweepstakes, but reported a tangible increase in savings. 1,500 people have won prizes thus far. Since the launch, MoneyCard Vault users are saving an average of 35% more.

“For many customers, it’s the first time they have been able to take advantage of an FDIC-insured account,” said Steve Streit, chairman and CEO of Green Dot, which issues Walmart’s prepaid cards, during the press conference. “It sounds corny, but for low income Americans, something as simple as a flat tire can be a crisis. Putting money aside gives you hope.”

Walmart and Green Dot collaborated with Commonwealth, an organization that creates prize linked savings products in the U.S., generating more than $153 million in savings by 75,000 Americans, according to Walmart’s press release.

“Even a small amount of savings can help people going into debt or borrowing at high cost,” said Tim Flacke, executive director of Commonwealth, during Thursday’s call. Commonwealth was formerly known as D2D Fund, which teamed with Filene to study the impact of a prize savings program for credit unions. Other providers in the space include SaveUp, a startup that has teamed with payment companies such as PayPal to offer prize-linked savings incentives.

Prize Savings is available in all 50 states. The state rules regarding contests linked to savings accounts are complex, and there’s also a federal law governing the practice. Regarding compliance, Walmart and Green Dot’s program is operated as a sweepstakes, while the varied laws and regulations regarding prize-linked savings refer to “savings promotion raffles,” according to an email from Walmart’s external public relations firm.

Walmart contends it’s the only retailer offering prize-linked savings nationally, though banks and credit unions have tried the model for years. Blue Ridge Bank in Virginia late last year unveiled a product in 2015, citing the same Federal Reserve stats as Walmart.

Prize Savings also allows Walmart to make a financial inclusion play while maintaining its positioning as an alternative financial servicesprovider. The retailer a backer of the Merchant Customer Exchange, a nationwide team-up of retailers that unsuccessfully tried to deploy a common mobile wallet platform. Walmart has since debuted its own mobile payments app, which is seen as a spark for other retailers to build their own apps.

Walmart’s more direct financial inclusion efforts include services such as the Walmart2Walmart transfer service, which the retailer aims at underbanked users that use transfers as a primary way to move funds to recipients at other Walmart stores. In an earlier interview with PaymentsSource, the retailer said its ultimate goal is to meld many of these digital payment and financial inclusion services into a cohesive mobile-driven financial services play.

First appeared at Payments Source

The post Walmart’s latest bid for the underbanked: A virtual prepaid ‘vault’ appeared first on FinTech Ranking.

Payments companies have traditionally been among the most financially attractive out of the whole FinTech array in addition to being the most represented globally. However, a conventional type of a payments service provider (PSP) is not all there is to payments.

As financial technology brought new types of shareholders into the scene, the payments segment was not an exclusion with the emergence of non-financial companies gaining power and attention. Examples of such companies include coffee chains, ride-sharing companies, e-commerce and social media giants. And most interestingly, even without naming, everyone would know which companies those are exactly. At the moment, let’s focus on a unique case of a non-financial company-wide focus on mobile payments experience, embodied by strategic partnerships and developments.

Starbucks is the real winner in the mobile payments game

Starbucks is one of the most vivid examples of the role that an outsider can gain in the financial services industry. The coffee chain company owes its success with mobile to a streamlined experience, which starts without customer even leaving the house. Bloomberg reported that in February, about 7 million orders were placed through mobile devices in US cafés. The order-ahead feature already accounts for about 15% of those payments, and 3% of total transactions.

Starbucks offers the largest and most robust mobile ecosystem of any retailer in the world

With more than 12 million Starbucks Rewards members (up 18% YoY), 8 million mobile-paying customers with one out of three now using Mobile Order & Pay, and more than $6 billion loaded onto prepaid Starbucks Cards in North America during the past year alone, the coffee chain offers the largest and most robust mobile ecosystem of any retailer in the world.

The most successful loyalty program?

Starbucks’ loyalty program is a successful example of how a company can turn transactions into an experience. In fact,38% of Starbucks tender comes from rewards or gift cards, 33% of which are registered and enrolled in the Starbucks Rewards program. Starbucks rewards program is designed to encourage using mobile ordering, which leads to enticing rewards, such as free refills, generous discounts, and the occasional free drink or sandwich.

Mobile focus as a core strategy of growth and development

Starbucks’ mobile app is a benchmark in its category. It’s the only thing one needs to get a product with no interaction with anyone and no standing in line – the app accounts for 25% of total in-store purchases at the chain.

Over the past years, the company turned its focus towards the mobile experience. As Adam Brotman, the Seattle-based chain’s Chief Digital Officer, commented at the beginning of this year, “The app is very important. It’s become one of our core strategies.”

Social gifting emphasis in partnership with China’s leading mobile social communications service

Not only has Starbucks become a rare successful case of utilizing loyalty program to drive mobile payments, but the company also knows how to forge beneficial partnerships in support of its strategy. Recently, the company became the first retail brand to combine and bring a locally relevant social gifting and digital payment experience to life on WeChat in China. At the beginning of December, Starbucks and Tencent Holdings pioneered a strategic partnership to co-create a new social gifting feature on WeChat, China’s leading mobile social communications service, in early 2017.

Starbucks + AI for an enhanced mobile experience

With the impressive success of Starbucks’ mobile-focused strategy, the years to come are expected to deepen the company’s roots in mobile experience. Less than a week ago, the coffee chain revealed an innovative conversational ordering system – the AI-powered My Starbucks Barista for the Starbucks Mobile App.

Starbucks’ chatbot will allow customers to place their orders via voice command or messaging interface, delivering unparalleled speed and convenience, enhancing customer loyalty and engagement and further extending the accessibility of the Starbucks app. The My Starbucks Barista feature is slated to be rolled out first on iOS in limited beta in early 2017 and will be made available to more iOS and Android users in subsequent releases.

Emphasis on a personalized mobile experience

As the company reported, Starbucks hyper-personalized e-mail reward offerings – with more than 400,000 variations – have more than doubled customer response rates over previous segmented email campaigns, translating into increased customer engagement and, importantly, accelerated spend.

Starbucks has delivered personalized offers to customers directly on the front screen of the mobile app. By early 2017, the company expects to complete the rollout of suggested selling and recommendations (suggesting items for pairing or additions to a customer’s order) during Mobile Order and Pay checkout, which the company believes will further fuel engagement and growth.

Encouraging higher tickets with rewards program

With Starbucks Rewards, customers are finding increased value when being rewarded for bigger purchases. This enables the company to boost tickets, create greater marketing flexibility and pursue “Stars Everywhere” partnerships to create further Star-earning opportunities, while reducing “order splitting.” With a 94% program retention rate, and new international markets on the horizon, the program is stronger than ever before.

First appeared at LTP

The post Starbucks: The Unlikely Winner in Mobile Payments appeared first on FinTech Ranking.

By Venturebeat

Allset, an app that promises to cut restaurant wait time in half by allowing customers to book tables and preorder meals, announced today that it raised a $2.35 million investment led by New York-based VC firm Metamorphic Ventures

With operations in San Francisco, Palo Alto (California), and Manhattan, Allset plans to expand its service to Los Angeles and Chicago. The funding capital will also help AllSet to expand product research, development, and marketing.

While Allset is free for its users, the service charges 10 percent of each order to the restaurant.

Andreessen Horowitz, FJ Labs, and SMRK VC Fund all participated in the seed round. Allset has raised a total of $3.35 million, including a million-dollar pre-seed round.

First appeared at Venturebeat

The post Andreessen Horowitz-backed Allset raises $2.35 million to cut your restaurant wait in half appeared first on FinTech Ranking.

So you’re a techie and a foodie. You’re having dinner and your phone buzzes to let you know you can pay for the meal you’re enjoying right from an app. It’s then you realize there’s something going on in restaurant tech.

If you want to know more, or get involved, this is your primer — because there is a lot of new action in the restaurant industry and we’re going to break some of it down.

Restaurateurs: Even though you have a wealth of resources dedicated to you, we hope this brief outline gives you a few ideas to consider if you’re looking to upgrade or switch your tech package.

What is the restaurant OS?

Just like the operating system (OS) for your computer, a restaurant needs a logical set of systems that allow it to do business efficiently. Well-known examples include OpenTable for reservations, NCR Aloha POS for check management and kitchen notification and Shiftboard to manage staff schedules. There are many operational requirements to run a restaurant; here we’ll highlight a few of the tech options that are vying to improve restaurant operations and consumer experiences.

Restaurant tech is not new: the point of sale machine introduced in the 1980s revolutionized how orders were placed and fired in the kitchen. Later, online reservation systems removed the need to call restaurants during business hours to request a table. Now, foodies in some cities are getting meals from their favorite table service restaurants delivered at home in less than an hour. Last year we saw more people were eating out than shopping for groceries.

Restaurants are working hard to upgrade their tech options in order to increase satisfaction, diner acquisition and retention, as well as optimize margins. Going out for a great meal is fun, but running a restaurant can be tough because of razor-thin margins and rising wages. There’s a lot of potential for dramatic growth for tech in the restaurant business. Avensure restaurant health and safety service makes sure to keep the restaurants and its staff healthy and safe.

Ingredients in the restaurant OS

To run smoothly, restaurants require several areas of operations —  but there’s the catch, because restaurants are crazy places. Restaurant systems need to cope and adapt to a constantly changing environment. Of the many demands to running a restaurant, we’re focusing on restaurant-specific tech and products that price on recurring operating expenses; not real estate, design and capital expenditures for large equipment purchases like a wood pellet pizza oven.

These breakdowns are by operational features, but there a few different feature alignments, producing repetition of some companies.

Diner experiences and front of house

Restaurant tech most heavily geared toward diners’ experience:

Established: more years, ubiquity and market share. New Tech: fewer years, and more limited market share. (click to enlarge)

Kitchen and back of house

Products and tech focused on producing and delivering great food:

click to enlarge

Staffing and staff management

click to enlarge

Even with all the pretty logos and feature slices, there is still a lot of room for innovation and growth. In particular, the back of house has not changed much, and offers a lot of room for modernization or optimization.

In the discovery and reservation slices there are many players, but also plenty of overlap. With so many of them, the biggest stand out as very utilitarian and very expensive for restaurants. Meanwhile, the smaller ones are focusing on niche, but with a more competitive price package for businesses.

One more example of future innovation that’s needed is that we need personalized recommendations. There are many recommendation systems, but none offer great personalization. Finding a restaurant and choosing menu items can still be a roll of the dice. There’s a data deficit, and overcoming it leads to great personalization. In other words, we need something like the Netflix recommendation system for restaurants and food.

General observations

One size does not fit all. Just as not all restaurants are the same, not all technology or their product pricing structures are the same — and cannot be peanut buttered across all restaurants. If a restaurant experience is largely built on people and hospitality, tech is hard to implement and prove valuable. Fast, casual and quick service restaurants prove to be better environments for tech, in general. Finally, some restaurant tech products are geared for restaurant groups or chains.

Big POS terminals are the boss; tablets aren’t quite ready yet. Tablets are everywhere, but they’re not quite ready to replace every POS system, printer or terminal out there. Even the legacy POS providers like Micros offer tablet-optimized versions of their software. The biggest benefit of this is that it significantly reduces upfront costs and footprint.

Tablets also have a few problems that can impact some operations, like limited multitasking, a plethora of new devices to connect with, reliance on (potentially spotty) Wi-Fi, smaller screens and app competition with the host OS. These issues can actually lead to multiple tablets, with a single purpose each, taking up more room than promised.

The choice of POS impacts many other tech decisions. A restaurant’s choice of POS can impact and dictate a majority of other tech choices for it. The reasons are varied, from rich packages that include multiple features to limited integration options with other products.

A key example is the Square POS that offers no choice in other payment processors but has a marketplace of integrations, whereas Micros and Aloha support many payment processors but have few external product integrations.

All-in-one packages and lack of integrations build walled gardens. Wherever there is a package of several features, there are also natural conflicts with other products. For example, if a restaurant integrates an entire Aloha package, which comes with staff-scheduling capabilities, they may not want to consider something like Hot Schedules because it would reduce the ROI of the package deal and incur additional costs. Furthermore, that additional package may not even integrate with the POS, and creates an extra item the team needs to learn and remember to use.

It’s hard to compare labor costs with SaaS products. Restaurant owners or managers who don’t have a great staffing and payroll analytics package have a hard time quantifying human labor versus tech products. They want to reduce labor costs, but also aim to improve their margins overall.

So when considering a work-optimizing SaaS product, it can be tricky to figure out the value of the software to the time and effort. It is helpful that some providers have started talking about their costs relative to existing costs. A restaurant could consider itself similar to an early-stage tech startup, constantly managing a revenue and burn rate versus product/hire acquisition needs and likes.

Considerations for new products

If you’re working on a new product for the restaurant business, we want to know! But you should have a few things in mind to help you succeed.

First, please have a good grasp of the user journey of the decision-makers and the users. Any disruption in process/tools/tech can break a rhythm to service and be a cause for pushback from staff. Understanding the user journey and restaurant requirements should also help you understand that a normal consumer app MVP won’t cut it; you’ll need more thought and polish before you release.

Next, be mindful that not everyone in a restaurant will speak the same language or share the same level of tech savvy. On-boarding, training and support is paramount to success of your product, as well as the restaurant. You can’t get stickiness without constant pressure but keep it light and simple, because it will cut into overhead. Consider that staff turnover may impact your product usage and impact the restaurant’s desire to stick with something outside of the norm or established.

Finally, always keep in mind that restaurants are in the hospitality and service business. Anybody who approaches a restaurant without that mindset is likely to be rejected  — this is all about relationships and how you support the industry.

As Danny Meyer says in Setting the Table, “Business, like life, is all about how you make people feel. It’s that simple, and it’s that hard.” When you reach out to a restaurant owner or manager to pitch them on your product, think carefully about when and how you reach out. Understand that restaurant owners and managers get a lot of solicitation for new things.

I’d like to thank Anna Tauzin at the National Restaurant Association, Seth Hammond at Stateside, Jeff Trenum at Blue Plate and Aimee Palacios for their insight and support.

FEATURED IMAGE: IVAN V. LEBEDEV/SHUTTERSTOCK

First appeared at Techcrunch.com

The post The restaurant OS appeared first on FinTech Ranking.

Starbucks this morning announced the overall of its mobile application, now used by 17 million people, in an effort to create a more personalized experience for its customers. The changes rolled out alongside an overhaul of the company’s popular customer loyalty program, Starbucks Rewards, which is now doling out stars based on dollars spent in stores, rather than how often customers make purchases.

The changes to the rewards program are already receiving some backlash from consumers who are complaining about how much harder it is to earn free rewards. Customers now earn two stars for every dollar spent, instead of one star per visit. That means they have to earn 125 stars (~$63) to reach a free reward, when before it just took 12.

It also will require more spending to level up in between the different reward program tiers, which have been reduced from three to two: Green and Gold. Now, customers will need to earn 300 stars to move from Green to Gold, for example.

Other tweaks include the addition of double-star days (4 stars per $1 spent), and a series of strategic partnerships with technology companies including Spotify and Lyft, which will allow customers to earn stars outside of Starbucks. JPMorgan Chase, which powers the Starbucks Rewards prepaid card, will also be involved.

This is a significant overhaul to Starbucks’ loyalty program, which is seen as one of the industry’s best in terms of traction, growth, and its embrace of technology innovations. Starbucks popularized using barcode scanners in its stores to track its customers’ visits and purchases first with plastic cards, and then with smartphones. Its mobile payments platform was adopted well before mainstream advances in mobile payments, like Apple Pay or Square.

Now the company is pushing forward with a Mobile Order & Pay solution that lets customers skip the line by ordering ahead. And it’s experimenting with a delivery servicein partnership with Postmates.

The Starbucks mobile app, and the company’s focus on making technology a priority, has had a lot to do with the success of its loyalty program as a whole, as well as the company’s bottom line. The company said this fall that mobile payments accounted for 20 percent of all in-store transactions across the U.S., and Starbucks processes nearly nine million mobile transactions each week.

However, the Starbucks’ app’s focus, to date, has been largely on helping customers find stores, manage their cards, order and pay. That’s now changing.

While one of the notable upgrades is the integration of Mobile Order & Pay with Starbucks Rewards (before, members couldn’t redeem rewards when placing mobile orders), the more noticeable change is to the app’s homepage.

Following the update, customers will now see an interactive stars display which responds to users’ touches, along with other changes designed to make it easier to track stars and reward levels. Another section shows what’s “Now Playing” in the local store the customer is visiting. As you may recall, Starbucks was already working with Spotify to enhance the app experience when it comes to music – in January, it began allowing customers to save songs heard in-store to the popular music streaming service.

Music will now be better highlighted in the new app, along with guest DJ playlists, says Starbucks.

The app will also began to feature personalized offers based on order history and other factors, and it will introduce more personalized content and features from its strategic partners in the near future, the company says. In addition, Starbucks will allow customers to earn stars outside of Starbucks stores.

These changes speak to Starbucks becoming a larger player in the mobile loyalty and commerce ecosystem as a whole.

Starbucks says the changes may create slower app functionality or stars credited over the next 48 hours as the updated experience rolls out, but it doesn’t believe the majority of customers will be negatively affected by the upgrade.

First appeared at Techcrunch.com

The post Starbucks rolls out a more personalized mobile app along with a revamped Rewards program appeared first on FinTech Ranking.

Singapore-based TabSquare announced today it has raised its series A round worth US$2.6 million. The round is led by Walden International and is joined by Infocomm Investments, Philip Private Equity, and Raging Bull, the Singapore-based investment company started by Thai Express restaurant chain founder Ivan Lee.

TabSquare allows restaurants to offer tablet menus. Customers can use them to order, redeem promotions, and pay, while the restaurant can update the menus in real time via a content management system that includes a cloud-based data warehouse and analytics engine. The app offers restaurants data to better understand customer behavior and spending patterns. The product can be integrated with what the startup calls “the leading point-of-sale systems in Southeast Asia.”

The company claims to count over 60 food and beverage (F&B) brands and more than 150 stores among its customers, including Far East Hospitality, Food Theory Group, and Japan Foods Holding.

TabSquare offers tablet menus where restaurant customers can order and pay.

Tabsquare will use the funding to strengthen its position in the Singapore market, further develop its technology platform, and expand to regional markets.

“TabSquare has been able to address the F&B industry pain points of a tight labor market: increasing costs and low profitability. We were impressed by the company’s ability to scale the business in a capital-efficient manner. We look forward to working with the team and supporting their growth,” said Kris Leong, vice president of Walden International, in a statement.

“TabSquare’s approach of building a strong end-to-end platform from the ground up, their vision of making restaurant operations more data driven, and their strong business model are what makes them unique and best positioned to be a leader in this space,” said Ivan in a statement.

Ivan’s Raging Bull has previously invested in Singapore-based beauty services marketplace Vanitee.

TabSquare had raised US$480,000 back in January 2013.

First appeared at TechinAsia.com

The post Singapore startup raises $2.6m series A to make restaurants more efficient appeared first on FinTech Ranking.