Glance Mobile Partners with Ricky's Restaurant, "It's Great to be Able to Offer Mobile Payment"

While Glance Mobile Technologies (CNSX:GET) is still a relatively young company, the mobile payment company has certainly carved a name for itself  by providing a technology that allows its users to pay their restaurant bills via an app.
Since launching in September 2016, more than 230 restaurants have begun using Glance Mobile Technologies’ Glance Pay app–with a large number of them in the Vancouver, British Columbia area–and the Ricky’s Group of Family-Style Restaurants is the latest one to do so. Announced on August 22, Glance Technologies CEO Desmond Griffin said the company feels it is a “true fit” to have the Ricky’s chain implement  Glance’s mobile payment app to enhance the customer service experience.
Over a one-day period, shares of the company have responded favorably, rising 8.57 percent to $0.19 at the close on Wednesday (August 23).

To that end, the Investing News Network (INN) had the opportunity to speak with Penny Green, COO and co-founder of Glance Technologies about the new partnership. “It’s great to be able to offer mobile payment as a solution,” she said in the interview.
Green also spoke to what has made the company successful in such a short period of time, the security and fraud protection technologies within the app, whether or not the restaurant locations are mostly chain restaurants or stand-alone restaurants, if Glance Technologies will branch out to other markets, investor response regarding the new deal, and what the company is looking forward to in the future.
The interview has been edited for clarity and brevity. Continue reading below for more of what Green had to say.
INN: I read the announcement that Glance Technologies has entered into an agreement with Ricky’s Restaurant. How did that partnership come about, and what will that mobile payment app offer? 
PG: It’s the same mobile payment app that’s been launched already in about 100 locations now in Canada. We launched on September 7 of last year, so we’ve been around for almost a year. The manager of Ricky’s in Victoria [British Columbia], about four months ago, was dining at the Fountainhead and saw Glance Payment used there, called us right away and said it’d be great to get it in Ricky’s in Victoria. So we said, fantastic. We got them launched Glance.
The franchise owner out in Victoria said, ‘this is great, it’s really convenient, I’m loving the rewards, the customers are so happy with it.’ They asked if we would like to meet with someone from corporate headquarters because they thought it would be great for the whole chain.  We went and met with the corporate headquarters based in Burnaby. It was really good timing because they’re a long-standing traditional family restaurant chain that has always done really well. But, they have recently introduced a new concept with something called Ricky’s Cafe, which is aiming to a appeal a newer demographic and putting a modern spin. They have a location that’s been live for six months, which is the first location we launched in [August 21]. It’s in Burnaby and it’s in a new cutting edge, clean energy development. Whole Foods is there, there’s a condo development there. [Ricky’s] wanted to put a more modern spin and improve the customer experience.
So, Glance Pay was an obvious choice for the kind of demographic and the kind of people that will be living in that ultramodern complex. It’s great to be able to offer mobile payment as a solution.
With it, we have an automated rewards program which works really well, so we love that, too.
INN: So people can go to Ricky’s and already use the app? 
PG: So it’s the Ricky’s [Cafe] in Burnaby [British Columbia]. The launch went really well [August 21]. They have 90 locations of their various type of restaurants. They’ve got Ricky’s All Day Grill, Ricky’s Country Restaurant, and Ricky’s Cafe. Our goal is to get into all 90 locations.
The same group that owns Ricky’s, the owner Frank Di Benedetto, owns Fatburger Canada. If everything goes well with Ricky’s, we will be looking to some other big chains that are related.
INN: I note that Glance Technologies’ Glance Pay app is already being used in 230 locations. What has made the company so successful since its launch date last year? 

PG: We have a great executive team. Our CEO and founder Desmond Griffin, he co-founded and was the CEO of PayByPhone for seven years. He is a pioneer in the mobile payment space. He built one of the most successful mobile payment apps in the world, with over 10 million users. It’s owned by Volkswagen now, and is in 100 cities.
When we teamed up, he wanted to improve the restaurant space. He wanted to build something that would be a great customer experience that’s scaleable and that had anti-fraud provisions.
We spent a couple of years developing something that is very scalable and solid with amazing technology. I think our real strength is we have amazing technology and we have a great development team with senior engineers that, every day, are working to make the technology even better.
We come out with a new version of the app at least once a month. It has new features that restaurants have sent to us and said ‘this is what we really want.’ For example, one of the things Ricky has really liked, is there’s a feature in our app which encourages people who have had a really good experience at the restaurant to go and post a review. This helps people make decisions on where to buy, where to go, especially through their mobile phones.
The restaurant has the option of a feature, which is after someone has made a payment on their phone, there’s five-button stars if they are happy with the person’s experience and they want to send them to our review division to do that.
So that’s something we built in about six months ago. About seven months ago, we built an anti-fraud provision to make it very difficult for anyone to be fraudulent in using the app as a payment device.
As far as our technology innovations go it has been very successful. We are patent-pending for a lot of those.
INN: That was one of my questions. Because security is obviously a rising concern in all aspects of the technology industry, and particularly when it comes to information being compromised. Can you speak a little bit about the security and fraud protection that’s implemented in the app?
PG: Basically, there’s no way to get anything out of the app. It’s just the way that’s been designed. It was designed by one of the head architects in the world.
Of course, we’re PCI compliance … as well.
INN: You said that your app can be used in 100 locations across Canada. Are they mostly chain restaurants or are they individual restaurants? 
PG:  Our focus when we launched a year ago, we went to as many restaurants as we could find in downtown Vancouver. We wanted to get off a brand. So we have a lot of restaurants in downtown Vancouver, and they’re not chains–they’re one-offs. Some are new restaurants and they’re all great places to go eat.
That’s why the discovery feature in the app is cool because you can go in there and look and see which restaurants are close to you. You know that it’s a modern enough restaurant to have signed up with us and offer mobile payments, so it probably has a lot of other interesting things going on as well.
We also signed Mr. Mike’s about eight months ago. They are in some really interesting locations like Cranbrook, BC. They’re in very small towns all across BC and throughout the prairies. We had to develop a remote launch kit because we didn’t know we were going to go there. It’s a really strong chain that has done really well with our launches, they love the automated rewards, they love improving the customer experience.  That chain is about 35 restaurants. [Ricky’s] is the biggest chain that we’ve signed to date, which is really one of the bigger chains in Canada. It’s very exciting because we’ve now got two chains signed. I think the other chains we’re talking to, they’re going to get more interested and see the competitive edge that Ricky’s has and they’re going to want to match that.

INN: I note that your focus is on payment stream systems for customer to pay their restaurant bills. Will Glance Technologies branch out to other industries, or keep its focus on restaurant bills?
PG: That’s a very good question. When Desmond was doing PayByPhone, he wanted to go to all verticals from all payments. He gets stuck in parking for seven years, and in one vertical there’s so much to do.
What we’ve noticed with our restaurant app, we developed … technology where you take a picture of the bill and then you send it to the restaurant with all the information. They can tell the table number, they can tell the waitress, and so on. But there was a lot of coffee shops and quick-serve places reaching out to us saying they wanted to use the app, so we developed a new version. With our new version that’s for quick-serve, you open your phone and either you send a payment directly to the merchant or they send a payment request to you.
The interesting thing about that is you don’t even have to be there. We call it Pay Anywhere as well, and if you want to make a reservation you can send a message to your customers who could be in another city. Then you can get your payment done through the app, which is super convenient.  There’s no writing down the card number, that kind of stuff.
Both of these features work for any merchant. We have a barber shop, we have a beauty salon we have a make-up place. We’re starting to look at expanding a little bit organically that way, but the other thing we’re doing is looking for groups that have expertise and contacts within a certain vertical. We’ve already done with CannaPay Financial. We did a licensing deal with CannaPay, so we did $1 million license to take our app and use it in the cannabis industry.
That company is developing two assets. One is mobile payments for anyone in the cannabis industry, and the other one is mobile payments for cannabis delivery. Both of those, you have to be very careful, has to be legal and in accordance with the government. So that’s one example.
INN:  Shares of Glance have responded well following the announcement. Have you heard any investor feedback regarding the new deal? 
PG: Yes. Investors are very happy. They really see chain adoption as one of the things that can really validate a new technology. When we launched, we had 50 restaurants, which was fantastic. We now have over 230 restaurants signed. It’s those really successful chain restaurants that really validate that you have something that actually works, so investors love that. So now we are hoping other chains will look at us and want to close some deals.
INN: What is Glance Technologies about regarding the company’s future? 
PG: We’re very, very excited. We’re growing at a tremendous rate. Our last quarterly financials we had a 664 percent revenue increase over our previous quarter, so that’s obviously very exciting.
We have so many new features that we’re working on that are going to be developed and released over the next six months. We intend to be a game-changer. We want to change the way merchants receive payments and and the way people make payments. We want to create mobile payments as one of the main standards throughout North America and perhaps further out.
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Securities Disclosure: I, Jocelyn Aspa, hold no direct investment interest in any company mentioned in this article.
The Investing News Network does not guarantee the accuracy or thoroughness of the information reported in the interviews it conducts. The opinions expressed in these interviews do not reflect the opinions of the Investing News Network and do not constitute investment advice. All readers are encouraged to perform their own due diligence.