CEO: “No one in the market — including Apple Pay — is experiencing exponential growth”

Sweden-based mobile payments provider Seamless is offering users of its Seqr mobile payments service up to 3% cashback on their purchases, “valid on all purchases and effective on top of any other loyalty program or discount.” The offer is designed to persuade more consumers to adopt mobile payments, CEO Peter Fredell has told NFC World, and is financed via a mixture of revenue streams.

To be eligible, customers must “make one purchase or more through Seqr per month — regardless of the purchase value — for a 1% cashback reward,” the company says. “Twelve purchases or more generates a 2% cashback, while 20 purchases and above generates a 3% cashback.”

“It’s a mix of revenue streams that finances this cashback,” Fredell explained. “We have, on average, about a 1% merchant service charge in the countries we are in so that’s been what we charge the merchant, and then we have advertisements in the app where we show everybody who buys something an ad when the transaction is completed, and that gives us about 30 cents per transaction.

“And then we have income from digital coupons that are also in the app, where we charge a handling fee from the producers that show coupons in our app. The margin price of that for people who are handling coupons is between 10% and 30% of the redeemed value of a coupon. And then, finally, we have what we call ‘Shop Spot’.

“Essentially, because of our technology being quite unique, we can show a QR code on an advertisement that leads you straight into the purchasing. You’re not sent to a website or anything, so if you see a nice toaster or sunglasses in an ad with the Shop Spot on, you can scan that and then you’re asked if you really want to buy it, you PIN code it and there you go.

“So we’re the only ones who can do that and, therefore, we get a very nice channel margin between 10% and 15%, plus the transaction fee.”

“The users grow everyday for everyone and the transactions grow everyday, but no one in the market — including Apple Pay — is experiencing exponential growth,” Fredell continued. “Clearly, we all want to experience exponential growth, but no one has really found that formula for that.

“We are constantly trying new ways of attracting consumers and so here we have very good digital coupons and offers and stuff like that, and those are definitely helping our growth numbers, but we need to try various things. We still have the room to give this type of cashback a try.

“Everything when you do it from the start is a test if you want, but it’s definitely a permanent feature. We have now said that we will do this and we will continue doing it. This is one way to see if a generalised cashback will both attract more consumers and to make those consumers use it more frequently.”