London Inc. September 2021 - 34

COVE R
Boiled down, that merging of payment and marketing
into one system is what Paystone's value prop is. " That's
how we're hoping to build the unicorn, " Al-Ansari says.
" On that gamechanger. "
2021 has made it impossible to ignore Paystone's place
in the city's tech sector. Funding announcements have
been significant. In January, they closed a $69 million
financing round that saw them bring in investment from
the National Bank of Canada as well as the Canadian
Business Growth Fund, an investment fund made up
of Canada's largest banks. Six months later, the team
announced that it had secured another $30 million in
strategic investment from Crédit Mutuel Equity.
That financing will, they hope, drive Paystone's next
stages of growth. " I want to be perceived as a global
company, " Al-Ansari says. " We just launched in the U.S.
this year, and I would like to establish ourselves as a
North American player, and soon go onto a global scale,
expanding beyond North America. "
The next 12 months will see Paystone expand its
workforce, and " really putting all the pieces together
for the platform and growing the team, " Al-Ansari says.
Now that they have built their platform, more attention
is going to be paid to how best it can be deployed.
That their growth trajectory seems to have accelerated
now is no accident. Between Covid and more widespread
use of mobile technology in payment, we are in the midst
of a true evolution in the way basic transactions are done.
The continued growth of social media means the value of
reputation marketing has rarely been higher. And on top
of that, a pandemic has encouraged businesses to seek
out and build loyal relationships with their customers.
Al-Ansari says one of their target demographics is
" ecommerce-resistant businesses, " mainly service-oriented
businesses that don't have an online storefront.
" If you ask any business out there, what is the number
one thing you need? They'll tell you they need customers, "
he says. But not just customers in the aggregate; the real
prize is in repeat customers, the kind who write reviews
and post about your business. " The secret sauce is to turn
their best customers into fans who would do these things
to help them grow. "
What might further explain Paystone's belief that their
time has come is also this: It has become increasingly
difficult to unlink how you buy with your personal info.
In any given transaction these days, you might give to
the business your name, a phone number, an email. An
online booking might be automatically added to your
personal calendar, or you might text a central system for
contract tracing. All of this constitutes a trail of digital
breadcrumbs about your consumer life. And while none
of this is Paystone's doing per se, the platform is ideally
positioned for consumers who are getting used to all this.
Many businesses, meanwhile, are getting used to it
as well - texting offers to their customers and pushing
marketing through a variety of digital channels. More
companies are recognizing the need to shift from product-centred
strategies to customer-centred approaches,
and loyalty programs have become a popular way to
improve customer retention.
According to the research firm Beroe Inc., the global
loyalty program market was valued at more than $180
billion in 2019. A lot of the infrastructure for that is still
quite makeshift - many businesses may have loyalty
programs they designed and operate themselves - so it
was perhaps inevitable that the Paystones of the world
might materialize. Shopify helped turn e-commerce
and drop shipping into a globe-spanning industry worth,
by some estimates, trillions of dollars; Paystone's billion-dollar
ambition is that they can do something like
that, too.
For now, Paystone is fully concentrated on mapping
and managing that growth. Over the years, the firm
grew through the acquisition of different businesses -
like the one with DataCandy, which brought them new
functionality, as well as quieter acquisitions like their
2019 purchases of POS West and NXGEN that rapidly
expanded their client base.
34 | londonincmagazine.ca | SEPTEMBER 2021
http://www.londonincmagazine.ca
London Inc. September 2021

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