What's CrayCray about CrayPay? It's Crazy Good!
Will a start-up company raising $2M in an ICO which commenced July 8, 2018 end up disrupting a $2.2 trillion industry by 2020 (according to McKinsey)?
In a study of the global payments industry, McKinsey suggests retail payments transformation is successful only when developers start with the end-customer, which is why CrayPay has a strong chance of succeeding when it comes to driving consumer adoption of cryptocurrency as a means to buy things outside the traditional “cash and credit card” networks and models.
CrayPay is a mobile payment app with 50k participating retailer locations.
The company has been able to generate adoption by the sell side and the buy side even before launching its ICO.
The 50K retailers number is associated with the 120 national brand partners (in the US to start), where CrayPay’s digital currency, CrayCoins can not only be spent on merchandise, but earned into consumers’ digital wallets.
“Looking ahead, digital innovation will continue to be a primary disruptive element in the payments arena,” the McKinsey report says, with “the continuing shift of retail commerce from brick-and-mortar outlets to digital platforms…centered around digitization… to be on the leading edge of payments growth in the coming five years.”
Marshall Greenwald, Founder and CEO of CrayPay is no stranger to the retail payments industry, given the success of Discount Payment Services, the first company he founded to provide less expensive processing of billions of electronic payments for over 4,500 companies.
"It's exciting to be building a new era of payments, where consumers are empowered and value is recognized in every interaction,” Greenwald said.
Marshall is joined by co-founder Jared McClure, former founder and president of Transfer for Less, a technology company for digitizing assets.
"Cryptocurrencies will completely reshape how we transact, and CrayPay's mobile payment network is the perfect vehicle to bring about that evolution," McClure said.
With a team of developers, CrayPay has created a platform that pays a portion of every transaction as an incentive to drive mobile payment adoption. They add to that value prop by also extending an additional 10% of the retails price in CrayCoin back to the consumer for future spending.
Earned by spending within the CrayPay app, CrayCoins can be used for purchases in-store and online with a growing number of well-known brands in the US including AMC Theatres, American Eagle, Best Buy, Chili’s, Domino’s, GAP, Lowe’s, Outback Steakhouse, and Sears.
One of the beauties of CrayPay is that it integrates with the point of sale (POS) systems already in use by merchants, with zero need for new equipment or employee training.
Given their experience serving consumers and corporations, the CrayPay team recognized early on that consumers don’t have an incentive to use crypto currency at retail; this led to the innovation to bake immediate savings in.
Consumers also don’t geek out on crypto currency like some of us, and prefer simplicity which the CrayPay app delivers, using an intuitive single app experience on a network that connects over 50,000 retail locations.
The company points to a “triple play” marketing opportunity consolidating their own business model as addressing $50 million rewards market, a $600 billion cryptocurrency market, and $1 trillion payments system market. CrayPay is poised to capture share from three separate and rapidly growing markets: Rewards, Cryptocurrencies and Payment Systems.
To continue to grow, the company founders are raising working capital the new-fashioned way, with an ICO which touts a high utility token backed by an already established company with real revenue, real end-users and real brand partners.
In a blog posted earlier this year, the company posits, “What good is a pile of currency, if you can’t spend it? Investors have been left to speculate on which cryptocurrency to buy, treating coin investments like traditional stocks and profiting from the arbitrage. Investors have sought out crypto exchanges without fees to maximize profits but have still been forced to exit to realize gains, lacking any real option to directly spend the cryptocurrency on goods and services. In spite of the current status quo, the crypto community is fully aware that merchant acceptance is the elusive puzzle piece needed to completely establish a legitimate cryptocurrency market, and the key to an entirely new landscape of possibilities. Limited acceptance, as challenging as it may be, is still only the first big hurdle.”
CrayPay is not even one year old, having launched their “mobile payment and marketing” platform in the last quarter of 2017, and today supporting over $100K in consumer spending. The ICO funding will enable CrayCoin, which will be an ERC20 token on the Ethereum blockchain to expand into the retail consumer market.
Anyone who uses the app post ICO to make a payment will receive 10% of the retail purchase back in the form of CrayCoin token adding an incentive layer while also providing the retailer a less expensive way to process purchases.
“The simplicity by which it will be distributed rivals existing reward point programs, with which consumers are familiar, meaning most recipients will be looking to spend their ‘free’ CrayCoin just as they would redeem reward points,” the blog continues. “At current run rates, that will be over $10,000 a month in CrayCoin that can immediately be spent within the app. That’s a decent amount of spending motivation.”
Edited by Ken Briodagh
