LevelUp is Down to Half Its Former Headcount, and Needs to Raise Money Fast

What service is LevelUp providing? A loyalty club and CRM for only customers that use LevelUp? It seems that shop owners are either town between forcing a major change on customers or just having a LevelUp POS incase a customer wants to use his phone to pay for stuff. For this to be sustainable, shop owners should have incentive to go LevelUp only. Also are the reduced merchant fees contracted?

Something few realize is that payment is about to make a serious shift as NFC becomes mainstream. LevelUp, being partially entrenched as an alternative to credit cards, could take off in a huge way if they can grab on to this leviathan.

As a consumer, if you use LevelUp at the merchant, you get x dollar credit for every y dollars you spend. For the merchant, you aren't paying any credit card fees on that y amount. For LevelUp, they take a cut from the x dollar credit amount.

I assume that LevelUp must batch credit card transactions in order to make the fees cheap for them, and that probably requires floating a good amount of money on a daily/weekly basis.

I use LevelUp almost everyday, sometimes multiple times a day. A lot of places in downtown Boston take it, and it seems like it's great for both the merchant and the consumer.

This isn't a good idea.

1 - Merchants don't take Bitcoin. LevelUp would have to convert BTC to USD for the merchant, and swallow any exchange rate fluctuations that may have occurred in the meantime (the value of BTC is, after all, far from stable). Even highly stable currencies are not completely free to exchange due to minor fluctuations in value over time. This is a money-losing proposition for LevelUp. This is part of why if you're spending GBP with your USD credit card the fees start piling up.

2 - Who would use it? Bitcoin has basically no presence outside of the tech community - and even there it's a tiny corner of the tech community (it's also the corner that thinks it's larger than it actually is). It would be nonsensical to invest that much effort doing such a niche thing in a product that is intended to be mass-market.

3 - Opportunity cost. LevelUp is in a do-or-die situation, there is no way they should do this over the thousands of other things they can do to save their company.

TBH I only ever use LevelUp when I think I might shop at a place a few times and get a few bucks of credit from LevelUp's investors. Never once have I used LevelUp because it's a more convenient form of payment. If I want to pay for something, I flip open my wallet and pull a credit card out because it's right out in front. With LevelUp, I need to look through multiple pages worth of app icons to find my payment options. No thanks. Yeah, a user could organize their apps, but why would they do so for your benefit. They will just use a credit card or cash because it's the path of least resistance. The truth is that this will only ever change once we reach the point that I only carry around a cell phone and never carry around a wallet. As long as the wallet is in my back pocket, I have a path of least resistance that will beat my phone every time and that is really unlikely to change until cell phones never fail. i.e. phones will need days worth of battery life, be water proof or at least water resistant and everything in my wallet can exist on my phone, including government issued identification.

If you want to make payment apps gain widespread adoption then campaign to get governments to let my put my ID on my phone, until then I will carry around a wallet and a credit card will be sitting there right next to the ID.