CardFree

In just a few short years, Monty's Good Burger has grown from a music fest popup to LA's premier #plantbased burger joint. With CardFree's online ordering platform, the Monty's team has found a reliable partner to help streamline its operations while gaining valuable customer insights to help them grow even further. #restauranttech #hospitalityindustry

🍣 Growing from NYC's Blue Ribbon Brasserie to multiple concepts around the country, Blue Ribbon Restaurants Inc has become a national brand. But managing payments across different POS systems at various locations wasn't ideal, which is where CardFree came in. We mobilized their POS via handheld EMV device to enable easy tableside payments, creating a uniform, simplified payment process, regardless of the POS platform. Get more info on our client spotlight page here: https://lnkd.in/gFAn5cnf #restaurantttech #fintech #restaurantindustry

☕ Showing appreciation for your loyalty members and giving to charity at the same time is a winning formula! If you're on the East Coast, hit up our partners, Aroma Joe's and join their loyalty program -- they're giving FREE 24oz coffees to loyalty members from 9/29 -10/5 and donating $1 to Make-A-Wish for each coffee. #restaurantebranding #restaurantmarketing #loyaltyprogram

Lots of restaurant operators strive to piece together the perfect tech stack, but often come up short. CardFree CEO, Jon Squire breaks down the "3 big buckets" of the ideal restaurant tech stack. Spoiler: It’s not always what your POS vendor is selling. #restauranttech #restaurantoperations #fintech

NFC wallet for transit makes sense purely from an ease of use perspective. Tapping at the turn style is so much easier than purchasing / reloading a card. The problem is that the total addressable market is relatively tiny (7-8 million riders who primarily use public transit to commute - ie, habitual users). There are roughly 4x more active Starbucks Rewards members in the US alone than there are habitual public transit commuters! Across the restaurant industry in the US, there are roughly 10x more transactions per year than there are public transit rides. I don't think that will surprise many people, but it does give a strong indication as where Wallet players should be looking moving forward....

Now that Apple is finally opening it’s SE to outside parties, the hunt for the winning Digital Wallet is fully on. We’ve been hit up by merchants, payments players and ecomm players looking to stand up their own solutions. Many of them are chasing ghosts of NFC past, though, instantly transporting us back to the same conversations we had 18 years ago when there was a strong belief that NFC adoption in the US could be ignited through transit. It’s déjà vu all over again. Why? When folks in Japan noticed some 20 years ago that most commuters were rubber banding their commute cards to the back of their phones, the light bulb went off - let’s put the chip from the card into the phone. Genius. It was the OG NFC Wallet and it worked…in Japan. Efforts to bring that model to the US (BART, CTA, ferries, tolls, e.g.) back then either failed to launch or didn’t move the needle. Fast forward to today and trying to revive that playbook in the US will not work (again). First, transit in the US does not touch enough potential customers on a habitual basis since we are heavily reliant on cars, for better or for worse. Post Covid, less than 5% of workers in the US use public transit to commute and a huge chunk of that is just in NYC. Apple Wallet is firmly entrenched with the MTA so there goes most of the addressable market. Second, getting the infrastructure in place with fragmented transit authorities is no easy task (believe me, we tried to for this very purpose) and certainly will not be fast. Again, it didn’t work before so there is no reason to believe it will work now. After kicking the transit can down the road 15 years ago, we looked at who does influence daily customer behavior and who can’t be blocked by external parties like the carriers and payments big boys. Hmm, coffee gift cards? Who is the biggest for both…Starbucks. Just like transit won’t be the winning solution, the original Starbucks model will need to be advanced, but what is clear - in the U.S. marketplace you’ll need merchant adoption and habitual touchpoints to win the day…stay tuned #nfc #mobilewallets #mobilecommerce #digitalwallets

💰 Omni-channel ordering at your restaurant = more sales. 🎉 Easy, right? Well, yes and no. How long does that take and what does that look like? The answers there are tougher to nail down and can vary drastically depending on how your business is run. Every operation runs its own race, whether it’s a sprint or a marathon. In the slides below, we’ve broken down some real-world data from our partners, illustrating 3 scenarios that show just how different the journey can be. More on the path to ROI here: https://lnkd.in/gN7xBw_d #restauranttech #fintech #digitalorders

We completely agree — no one walks into a restaurant thinking, "I can't wait to experience their payment system!" (unless they're tech super-nerds like us). In restaurants, technology shouldn't be the star of the show — it’s the invisible backbone making sure everything runs smoothly. For us, that means solutions that simplify every guest interaction across dine-in, pickup, delivery, curbside, and drive-thru. When tech fades into the background, there's more room to focus on what really matters — the food and service that gives guests an experience worth coming back for. #restauranttech #fintech #digitaltransformation

"If I take something that takes an hour from my GM’s life so they could spend an hour with a guest or training a team member, that’s a huge win.”  -- We've said before that the path to ROI on restaurant tech is a marathon, not a sprint, sometimes with a scenic route. While there are clear financial benefits (e.g. increased ticket size, faster table turns, higher throughput, fewer chargebacks), the benefits of saving time and making life easier for your staff are tougher to measure, but arguably just as important. #restauranttech #fintech #restaurantoperations

In a crowded market, a new wave of restaurant brands are standing out by doing things a little differently — whether it's entering new territory with fully digitized dining or fresh spins on classic models, we’ve rounded up a list of rising stars you need to know. The future of dining is looking bold, flavorful, and a little unexpected… Read the full list here: https://lnkd.in/g8vgThqK #restaurantbranding #restaurantindustry #restauranttech