Going out to dinner with a group of friends or colleagues brings with it some hardships, such as calculating and collecting money for a split check without resorting to a spreadsheet and an ATM. And there’s always the much-beloved game of getting the check quickly, which involves staring in the direction of the waiter/waitress until he or she makes the mistake of seeing your glare.
PayPal and mobile vendor MyCheck had been trying to lessen that pain in a handful of small restaurants in New York City. It has now started a national expansion, cutting deals with restaurants in Nebraska, New Jersey, Florida, Texas, California and Washington, D.C., reports Gigaom.
“Once a diner checks into the restaurant, he or she can see a detailed tally of orders, calculate a tip, split the final check among a group and finally pay for the meal either through PayPal or with credit card info on file,” Gigaom reported. “MyCheck’s technology integrates with about 25 different retail point-of-sale systems, and it’s used by about 3,000 merchants globally, not all of them restaurants.”
MyCheck hardly has this space to itself, but the magic here rests with PayPal. Can PayPal push enough of its installed base to make this attractive for restaurants? What happens if that restaurant’s Wi-Fi crashes or it happens to be in a dead cell zone?
On the security side, U.S. restaurant check procedures—where a waitstaff employee takes a card and goes away for ten minutes to process the transaction, giving them plenty of private time to capture enough card data to create a clone card—are a huge security hole. (In EMV-friendly places like Europe, waitstaff tend to bring the check and allow the transaction to happen instantly in front of the customer, with the card never leaving the customer’s hand.) Would widespread mobile payments in restaurants make a substantial security dent?
We’re always on the lookout for opportunities to partner with innovators and disruptors.
Learn More