Benefit Mobile is a pre-paid mobile wallet that contributes up to 20% of each transaction to a school, nonprofit, or life expense of your choice.
It’s simple: Purchase a digital gift card for the total amount of your shopping trip through the app, receive your gift card instantly, and redeem it with the cashier or at checkout online. Benefit will make sure up to 20% of that purchase will automatically go towards the cause of your choice.
You can support your local school, help end world hunger, or invest in your own future through your normal, everyday spending, Benefit becomes the preferred way to pay.
Life is expensive. We live in the era of the dual income home that is time short and cash strapped. We do our best to balance funding an education, healthcare, mortgage, and giving to causes that make the world a better place.
Benefit helps consumers contribute to these monthly bills or charitable causes through their everyday shopping. We provide an intuitive, frictionless way to save and give back money.
We sell digital gift cards that are meant to be instantly redeemed at the register as a primary method of payment. We do this because we get big discounts on the gift cards that we then pass on to the cause of your choice. But don’t think of these as traditional gift cards. Sure, you can gift them, but more than half of our retailers allow you to buy down to the cent. This means they make a perfect alternative to a credit or debit card at checkout.
Similar to the Starbucks mobile approach, money is added to a barcode for instant scanning in store. Along with Starbucks, we have 130 other national retailers like Target, Walmart and Amazon, all contributing up to 20% on purchases. That means that up to 20% of your purchase price is donated to a charity or given right back to you to help pay your bills!
We provide customers with an ever increasing list of national brands that give back to their passions. We are also the only wallet that can promise card delivery in seconds for instant redemption.
You can choose to pay for your gift cards with either a credit card or ACH (direct bank withdrawal) transactions. To get the biggest rebates we encourage our users to use a checking account as their primary method of payment. Electronic checks also helps us keep our costs incredibly low and payment nearly instant, as opposed to paper.
Consumers love us because the rebates/donations come from their everyday spend.
Schools & Nonprofits love us because they can raise funds without asking for a dime.
Partners love us because we provide a loyalty/retention program that puts them front and center of their customers everyday purchases.
What kind of consumers benefit from Benefit? People like Jenny, Tammy, and Marti.
Jenny is a 34-year-old mother of three. Her children are in the Catholic School system, which is quite taxing on her husband’s $50,000 salary. They are always looking for ways to make their money go farther.
Tammy is a school volunteer with the local PTA. Every year it’s her job to decide on what fundraisers will bring in the most cash. She wishes there was something besides the pizza drives, popcorn tins, and car washes. She has grandkids of her own, works a part-time job, and needs to find a fundraiser that isn’t going to require too much of her time.
Marti runs the marketing department for a large health insurance provider. He is looking for ways to differentiate his company in a highly regulated industry. At the end of the day, it’s all about customer retention and acquisition. Wherever he can add extra value to his customers he is willing to spend the marketing budget to do so.
The partnerships we’re currently forming are exponentially growing our user base.
We have partnerships with Incomm, Cashstar and nearly Blackhawk, three dominant players in the gift card delivery space. The Incomm and Cashstar partnerships are huge — they deliver our digital cards instantly on demand, saving us from having to pre-buy, and dropping our inventory to zero.
Priority Health, the second largest health provider in Michigan, is paying us $250K for a three year contract to white label Benefit to their 650,000 members.
We have a partnership with 8 to 18 where they pay us $20K to distribute Benefit to their customers as a way to raise funds for athletic programs.
We also have relationships with two scrip companies that do $100 million in top line sales. They are now pushing us to their customers as a digital alternative as part of a revenue share agreement.
We have a large partership opportunity with Blackhawk Network. Details of the partership will be defined this month.
Deluxe, the largest provider of checks in the US, is a large partner. As an electronic check platform, they are taking transactions from the credit card companies. We are their only partner that has turned the electronic check into a primary method of payment at the register.
Nelnet and Higher One, large college loan originators, also have interest in distributing to their customer base.
We have 3 potential partners in the fundraising space each with 1 million+ customers.
We are talking with 2 CUSO’s that have 100+ credit unions in their association.
We are launching at Launchpad 360 at Money 2020 this year. We expect to make great connections at this conference.
You can find out more about us in Xconomy, NerdWallet, and MiBiz.
Up next: Our internal sales team will go after healthcare providers, banks, credit unions, college loan originators, mortgage lenders, and more! Our goal is sell $200 million worth of gift cards in 2017. In addition to large national retailers, we’re working on incorporating local businesses as well.
Derik has 15 years of design and front-end development experience for Fortune 100 companies. He has led several design teams on large product initiatives that captured millions of downloads. As CEO, he handles everything from fundraising, legal work, design, and public engagements.
Derik started Benfit Mobile after seeing first hand the shortcomings of Great Lakes Scrip, the largest scrip company in the US. They sell $1.5 billion dollars a year in gift cards to 20,000 schools and nonprofits.
Derik’s son’s school chose to use Great Lakes Scrip as a way to raise funds. He loved the idea of contributing through everyday shopping, but knew he would never order physical cards each week, pick them up from the school 4 days later, carry them around to stores while trying to remember the balances, etc.
As a mobile designer, he realized he could deliver these cards in 3 seconds right at the register, with no employees or card inventory. His idea could track balances, tell users how they contributed, and pass along the added benefits of location based deals and discounts. The market size could be increased considerably without the reliance on plastic having to be ordered and delivered.
Benefit Mobile was born.
Darron develops both the Apple and Android code base and manages the development of our reporting suite provided to our customers. Prior to Benefit, he ran the technology practice at Universal Mind, a company that delivers digital solutions for companies like Apple, Sony, Microsoft, FedEx, and Oracle among others.
Tom built our our go-to-market sales strategy, helps with fundraising, and fills gaping holes with his vast experience in the payments space. He was previously the head of business development and sales for Corillian which eventually exited for $250 million. He has also held VP positions at several large payment companies including Visa, FIS, and Virtusa.
Shane marries the design and interactions with the code base on both iPhone and Android platforms, making the experience beautiful and seamless. He worked with Derik on several large, highly visible product deliveries while at Universal Mind.
Amy does it all: promotions, marketing, customer support, sales, you name it.
CEO at Corillian, a leader in online banking. Led it to a $250 million dollar exit.
Legal Counsel and extensive experience as a VP in the healthcare space.
Executive Chairman at Founders Brewing. Responsible for making it the largest craft brewer in the country.
VP of Product at Priority Health. Extensive knowledge of healthcare space and how to sell Benefit to larger providers.