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The payment habits of Generation Z and Millennial consumers are providing some of the motivation for Glance Technologies Inc. to change its name and mission. Millennials were born between 1981 and 1996, and those born in 1997 and later are Gen Z members.
Announced Tuesday, the new corporate name is Perk Hero Software Inc. and its mobile-payment and loyalty-rewards platform is known as Perk Hero.
Vancouver, British Columbia-based Perk Hero, under its Glance branding, was known for its mobile-payment service that targeted restaurants.
“When Perk Labs first started out as Glance Technologies in 2016, the company had a clear destination in mind,” Jonathan Hoyles, Perk Hero chief executive, says in a blog post. “Glance wanted to be the mobile-payments company of choice in the restaurant space. That’s why Glance created the Real Time Bill feature, which allows people to access their bill instantly by scanning a QR code or tapping an NFC chip.”
But, Glance found the needs of restaurants were evolving. “They still value the speed and efficiency of mobile payments, but they’ve moved beyond that” Hoyles says. “Foodservice is one of the most competitive sectors in the economy. Restaurants want more than apps to make payments more efficient; they want tools to attract new customers.”
This coincides with expectations from younger consumers. “Our users want more than just convenient payments. They want added perks, like rewards and discounts. They want interactions with restaurants to be experiential, not just transactional,” he says. “This prompted us to pivot our business. We’re still enhancing our ability to manage receipts and payments using mobile devices, but our new app, Perk Hero, is now about more than mobile payments.”
Perk Hero will continue to pursue restaurants and will expand its scope to others, such as quick-serve restaurants, coffee shops, pubs, clubs, and hotels, among others. It also will offer a white label version of the app for merchants that want their own branding and customization.
The Perk Hero app enables consumers to pay three different ways. One is in-app ordering and payment. Another is to scan a Quick Response code at the table, the checkout counter, or in-app generated by the merchant. The third is Pay by Photo. With this last option, the user snaps an image of the paper bill. “We use machine-learning image recognition to recognize the bill total on the paper copy of the bill,” Hoyles says. With all of these options, the consumer can choose to pay with a credit card once it’s added to the Perk Hero app or they can use Apple Pay or Google Pay.
To accept Perk Hero, merchants complete a process that starts with downloading the app, completing know-your-customer and anti-money laundering forms, linking a bank account, and providing Perk Hero with logos or other materials they want displayed in the app.
Perk Hero will launch at select locations this week with expectations of a broader rollout later. The company will not say how many merchants it has recruited so far.
