Company and Vision
Zenpay Inc. is a San Diego-based early-stage startup company that provides a comprehensive merchant payments solution benefitting merchants and their customers. Our big vision is to radically change how billions of people pay for their retail purchases, eliminating checkout lines and paying remotely in a socially distanced manner that aligns with the post-Covid paradigm. Our goal is to save merchants significantly and enrich customers' shopping experiences.
Our Customer
Our customers are global small, medium, and large businesses and their consumer customers (B2B2C model).
The Problem
1. The current legacy POS systems from NCR, Clover, Toast, Square etc., used by the businesses are expensive and cost upwards of $300 (up to $800) per POS per month. This is a cost that is accepted by the merchants currently. This also results in extra staffing needs to manage checkout lanes
2. Merchants are using a variety of business operations software such as accounting, bookkeeping, inventory, sales monitoring, forecasting etc., from different vendors, incurring costs, managing various vendors and support issues
3. Merchants maintain acquirer bank accounts based on the cards they accept for their business. This results in acquirer bank management, fees, and expensive credit card fees (2.9% card present and 3.9% card not present)
Our solution
1. Zenpay provides a next-generation, extremely low-cost, low footprint, and green-friendly – based on Bluetooth Low Energy, RFID, and ultra-wideband that offers significant cost reduction to the merchants
2. We provide a single vendor, single point of contact for the merchants' business software and offer them a low monthly SaaS subscription model
3. We are a third-party acquirer talking to the card networks and issuer banks (ISO 8583), enabling authorizations, payments, reconciliations, chargebacks etc. Merchants don't need to bother about acquirer bank accounts and credit card payments.
4. Since we are a payment processor (get ~1% of the credit card fees paid by the merchant), we can revenue share this with the merchant, thereby reducing the merchant's cost and exposure to payments technologies
5. Our app allows customers to pay using their wallets (linked to their bank accounts and credit cards), ACH, and loyalty/rewards tokens.
Benefit to Merchants
1. Reduced business operations costs from POS, software and credit card handling (we have case studies showing 2% to 5% savings of the revenues based on the merchant's size)
2. Cost savings from employees needed to handle checkout lanes
3. Enable merchants to provide a significantly enhanced customer hospitality
4. Significant cost and risk savings for merchants doing check cashing services (over a $20Bn market in the US) by using the ACH check verification that does near real-time verification of checks
Benefit to Customers
1. Ease of shopping – scan items to purchase using the app and add to the cart
2. Ease of locating items by querying the item and getting the location (aisle/shelf)
3. Ease of getting invoices from the merchant back office without queueing in the checkout lanes
4. Ease of payment via a touch on the app
5. Quick exit from the store via active RFID scanner frames for security
Solution Components
Zenpay Inc. provides a comprehensive payments solution that covers the following:
1. Next generation Point of Sale platform – based on Bluetooth Low Energy, RFID, and ultra-wideband (coming)
2. Comprehensive merchants business operations software – accounting, bookkeeping, inventory, AI/ML-based fraud detection, intelligent reporting, sales forecasting etc., all at a low monthly SaaS subscription model
3. A third-party acquirer network communicating with the card networks and issuer banks
4. Merchant web portal, merchant back office and customer support for merchants and customers
5. Customer app for communicating with BLE POS and enabling customers to buy and pay
6. Centralized loyalty and rewards crypto token – payments are recorded on a blockchain, and tokens are issued.
Revenue Model
1. Once time merchant onboarding fee and get the POSs (typically $100 to $1000 depending on the merchant size)
2. Monthly SaaS subscription fees ($100 to $500 depending on the merchant size and software selected)
3. Flat credit card transaction fee (e.g., $0.15)
4. Flat cash transaction fee (e.g., $0.25)
Team
We have a great team of experienced technology and business professionals from companies like Qualcomm, Cisco, Google, Microsoft, Square etc., that have significant experience building highly scalable, flexible, and secure FinTech platforms.
We also have a solid business development strategy of partnering with incumbent telecom operators' enterprise arms that already sell to small, medium, and large enterprises in their respective countries of operations.
We have the ex-CEO and ex-CIO of Telefonica on our advisory board, with deep connections to the Telefonica enterprise markets in Spain and CALA.
We have two letters of intent from small and medium enterprises to deploy our solution in their stores.
Current Status
The company is self-funded by the Founder/CEO, Jay Jayasimha, to create a proof-of-concept. We have a team of extremely talented software specialists working on the proof-of-concept. We have the POS device built and patented.
Funding Raise
1. Year 1 – pre-series A: We are looking to raise $2.5M, enabling us to complete the initial product version for payments, go through the certifications and deploy with the SMEs that have provided us with the letters of intent.
2. Year 2 to 3 - Series A: We are looking at raising $6M, which will take us through 2 years and enable us to start deploying in two select markets – CALA and the US; and explore the EU/UK markets.