Sunday CEO Says QR Code Payments End Game is Making Cost of Payments Free for Restaurants

When it comes to consumer payments, table-service restaurants are far behind their own industry and many others too.

Simply put, restaurant payments often look and happen the same as they did decades ago. Consumers wait for a server to bring the bill, then wait for them to come back and pick up the customer’s credit card, and then wait again for them to return the customer’s card to sign and leave a tip.

That friction-filled process not only ties up servers and tables at a time when labor shortages have already caused many restaurants to operate short-staffed, but those delays also stress out customers and often lead to lower tips.

It’s exactly why restaurant payment solution provider sunday, a mobile payments platform that bills itself as “created by restauranteurs for restauranteurs,” uses QR codes on the table to view the menu, register diner-credentials once, and then enable swift payment at the end of the meal when they are ready to leave.

“Not many people think, ‘Oh, I want sunday’ unless they’ve used it because no one knows there is an alternative,” Victor Lugger, the company’s co-founder and CEO, told Karen Webster. “Why? It’s because it’s been 60 years of using credit card machines, so no one is challenging this, but before they launched Uber, no one saw that there was an alternative to raising your hand to hail a cab.”

Fewer Trips to Tables

By eliminating the time that it takes to make all these trips to and from a table, he said, waitstaff are freed-up to focus on other important tasks, and can therefore attend to more customers than usual, which in turn allows restaurants to operate at full capacity with less people. And for servers to get better tips.

Just five months after introducing the product, sunday is getting some attention from investors and restaurants both, having recently announced a $100 million Series A fundraise, which it plans to use to power its expansion, aiming to have 15,000 restaurants signed globally by the end of 2022. The company currently has offices in London, New York, Atlanta, Paris, Madrid and Barcelona.

While QR code payments have not yet caught on industry-wide, the early adopters are already seeing the positive results. Research from PYMNTS’ Restaurant Readiness Index, created in partnership with Paytronix, showed that 28% of top-performing restaurants offer the ability to pay with QR codes, compared to just 12% of bottom performers, suggesting that the most successful restaurants are more than twice as likely to use the technology — and for all of the reasons that Lugger identified.

See more: QSRs’ Lagging Loyalty-Reward Investment Hurts Innovation and Sales

The Problem They Didn’t Know They Had

“The feedback that people have about sunday … they don’t tell me that it’s great,” said Lugger. “What they tell me is, ‘Today I was in a restaurant, and they didn’t have sunday, and I hated it.”

Put another way, the company illuminates the problem as it is solving it. A problem that is also clear is the disparity between the share of consumers who say they are interested in paying with QR codes and the share who end up doing so when the option is available.

PYMNTS data from the Index showed that only 14% of U.S. consumers believe that QR code payment capabilities will be important to restaurants’ future success, compared to 30% of restaurant managers. Yet, Lugger said that an average of 60% of restaurant customers in the U.S. and EU who are presented with the options end up using the technology at restaurants where sunday is implemented and they have the option to do so.

By the Country

The share of consumers using the technology goes up when one looks at restaurant customers in some of the other markets in which sunday has a presence. For example, 95% of customers in London use the technology, which Lugger attributed to the increased adoption of Apple Pay in the city.

Additionally, he noted that in the U.S., where tipping is the norm, the technology increases tips by an average of 40%. In countries where there is less of a tipping norm, that percentage is even higher, because Sunday’s interface presents consumers with the option instead of paying a service fee. In France, the average increase in tips is 50%, and in the U.K., Lugger said the company grew tipping 100 times.

The sunday Wallet

The company’s near-term focus is on getting as many restaurants to use the technology as possible. Lugger added that while the solution’s usefulness for the quick-service restaurant (QSR) industry is apparent, with these restaurants’ value proposition centered on speed and convenience, fine dining establishments have also been getting on board.

The mass appeal and functionality of an invisible pay at the table solution that doesn’t involve waiting for checks, legacy check registers and credit cards or terminals at the tables or wielded by wait staff who hover over guests as they pay is as relevant in casual dining restaurants as it is in fine dining Michelin-starred establishments, Lugger said.

Down the line, however, Lugger confirmed that the company’s intention is to create a sunday wallet, with the aim to eliminate the cost of payments for the restaurants.

Lugger said that his aim is to eventually make restaurant payments free. At the moment, it’s about eliminating the credit card machines [at the table] and improving staff operations and efficiency.

“Tomorrow, [it’ll be] wallets — and [with] wallets, well, payment is free,” Lugger emphasized.”