Impatience and aggravation can be good motivators, just ask Desmond Griffin. Tired of the existing way to pay for parking, Griffin co-founded parking payment operator PayByPhone, which processed $250 million in parking payments from mobile devices from 12.5 million users worldwide in 2016, the year it was bought by Volkswagen Financial Services. Now seeing a better way to pay for restaurant checks, Griffin is at it again, founding mobile payment company Glance Technologies (CNX: GET)(OTC: GLNNF) to improve the bill-paying experience while dining out.
Everyone knows the drill when you’re done eating at a restaurant. Ask for the bill, wait for the server to bring it, then come back and get it along with your credit card, then leave again to run the card for approval before you finally sign off on it. The process is simply inefficient and can be aggravating, especially if you’re in a hurry. Glance’s solution: Glance Pay, a patent-protected mobile payment technology that streamlines how smartphone users settle their bills. For users at participating restaurants, the bill is paid and tip confirmed through a couple taps on a mobile device.
Moreover, the expanding service allows users to choose where they dine, order goods and services, access digital receipts, leave reviews, earn rewards and redeem digital deals, providing a turnkey solution for merchants and consumers to interact. Not missing a beat on staying out in front of shifting fintech landscape, cryptocurrency payments have also been integrated into Glance Pay.
A hallmark of Glance Pay is its unprecedented security. Users store their payment information in one secure location, decreasing the risk of fraud that plagues even the biggest companies in the world. To lend some perspective, Glance has not had a single instance of fraud in 2017. This is remarkable against the backdrop of Apple’s (NASDAQ: AAPL) ApplePay reported to have experienced a 6 percent fraud rate during its initial launch period and reports that 1.5 percent of all mobile transactions across all brands are fraudulent.
An Explosion in Expansion
Glance’s growth strategy was to start in the local Vancouver market and get some traction for the app and then expand. Glance Pay was first launched in September 2016. By April 2017, 140 restaurants were signed on across major Canadian cities, including Vancouver, Toronto, Edmonton and Victoria. In September, that number had climbed to over 230 restaurants in Canada and the first U.S. restaurant, Ta’cul Mexican Cocina in San Diego, signed up to use the technology.
As it happens, restaurants weren’t the only ones interested in the technology, companies came wanting to license it for their respective fields. CannaPay paid $1 million in license fees by issuing shares and giving Glance a 30% stake in the company to roll the Glance technology into its financial services for the legal marijuana business. Wellness network Active Pay agreed to $1 million for licensing and marketing services and agreed to a 10% royalty for Glance. Euro Asia Pay wanted a worldwide license for its services tailored to residents, students and tourists in North America coming from Asia and Europe. The agreement included a $1 million fee paid in part cash and in part by issuing $8.5 million shares (28% ownership) of Euro Asia Pay.
So, while building its presence in the restaurant business, Glance has diversified its revenue streams to capitalize on other burgeoning market opportunities.
Branding Genius: Cryptocurrency
The 1,600% meteoric spike in bitcoin, the best-known of all cryptocurrencies, in 2017 embodies a societal shift towards acceptance of digital currencies and the power of the underlying blockchain technology. While bitcoin grabs all the headlines today, there are hundreds of other digital currencies and tokens available that are all part of decentralized ledger technologies that are expected to revolution transactions of all types in the future.
To that point, Glance is introducing the Glance token, which will be granted as a reward to users of Glance Pay every time they use the app, regardless what payment method is used. This is a savvy move to support the adoption of both its mobile app and cryptocurrency across an array of consumers, incentivizing them to use both as value adds to the monthly spending while simultaneously supporting organic growth of the Glance brand.
To make this happen, Griffin did what he does best, surround himself with experts in every area of the biz dev strategy and scale through organic and inorganic growth. For starters, Glance co-founder Penny Green has a C.V. that sets her apart as one of the most successful entrepreneurial women in Canada. In fact, she was ranked #61 by Profit Magazines Top 100 Female Entrepreneurs, one of five national finalists for the 2012 Royal Bank of Canada Award for Excellence in Entrepreneurship. She is the founder and CEO of Bacchus Law Corp., which Profit Magazine dubbed as one of the top 500 fastest growing companies in 2015 and 2016. If that’s not enough to speak to the caliber of Glance’s COO, she also co-founded NASDAQ and TSX-listed Merus Labs International, which was just acquired by Norgine B.V. in July for about $342 million.
Safe to say, between the two co-founders, there entrepreneurial success abounds, as does experience in all aspects of the capital markets.
In addition to a seasoned management team, advisors providing direction now include the likes of: Spiros Margaris, who is ranked #1 global fintech influencer by Onalytica and #10 overall blockchain influencer by Right Relevance; Michael Vogel and Dominic Vogel, the founders of Netcoins; and Dinis Guarda, who is ranked 5th most influential influencer in blockchain in the world by Right Relevance, to name a few.
In October, Glance partnered with Netcoins, a marriage that brought together Netcoin’s technology that allows consumers to buy bitcoin with ease and Glance’s technology that caters to frictionless spending of cryptocurrency. The alliance overcomes a problem with bitcoin that involves slow clearance of transactions. By converting bitcoin to Glance dollars, lightning fast transactions can be completed.
Further, Glance recently closed on the acquisition of Blockimpact, an end-to-end cryptocurrency and blockchain solution run by Dinis Guarda at Ztudium Inc. The IP of Blockimpact was a synergistic bolt-on to existing Glance technology to give the company a much stronger position in the blockchain space. The $1.1-million buyout added biometric ID, blockchain distributed ledger technology, digital messaging that is similar to WhatsApp, a digital wallet, open API, technology that facilitates seamless conversion between currencies, social network features and much more.
A Trillion Dollar Market Opportunity?
With Glance Pay, Griffin is taking aim at a much bigger market than he did with PayByPhone. In the U.S. and Canada alone, the full-service and quick-serve restaurant industries are estimated by IBISWorld at C$360 billion and C$290 billion, respectively. Within this space, fintech payment systems will continue to capture share and mushroom. 80 million Americans are currently using mobile payment technologies, with the North American market expected to reach $500 billion by 2020.
While restaurants may be a grass roots component of Glance going forward, it is evident that the potential is further reaching, as already evidenced by the licensing agreements. Considering some 500 million people in China are active mobile users, $1.7 trillion in payments were made through Alibaba’s (NYSE: BABA) Alipay service in 2016 and users of Tencent’s WeChat sent approximately $1.2 trillion last year, the global opportunity begins to become even clearer.
It goes worth noting that global expansion is an area the Griffin has proven to be successful already.
Barely a year into it, Glance is already proving to be an impressive startup. The company was added to the CSE25 Index and CSE Composite Index this month, weighing in with the fifth biggest market capitalization amongst Canadian Securities Exchange companies. Investors are showing their support, helping carry the stock from 12 cents in August to a high of $3.20 in November. Institutions, management and insiders are onboard too, participating in a public offering that raised $11.05 million for the company, boosting its cash position to over $17.4 million and ensuring Glance has plenty of cash on hand to continue executing on its business model.
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