Dream Payments Corp.
Financial Institutions have legacy systems that are robust and reliable but they are not flexible or easily adaptable to the new devices and technology in market. By the time these institutions bring new features and products to market they are already dated or obsolete. Dream Payments Corporated (Dream) provides the means of delivering the user experiences and services that consumers demand today. “We want to be the trusted partner that helps the business to grow, go mobile, and build their businesses to realize their dreams,” says Brent Ho-Young, CEO. “We deliver mobile solutions and services that we offer through our partnerships.”
Since 60% of transactions in Canada involve Interac, many merchants are looking for better debit solutions. Dream provides businesses all across Canada with an affordable and cloud based Mobile Point of Sale solution while eliminating the expense and complexity of traditional point of sale solutions so business owners can focus on growing their business.
Helping Businesses Grow
Dream launched a soft pilot in late 2015, and commercialized with a full roll out for the retail environment in 2016. They partnered with Telus as a retailer for distribution. “We’re mostly known as a mobile point of sale product,” says Christian Ali, Chief Marketing Officer. “We’re the only solution in North America where you can actually walk into a retail location and purchase a point of sale device off the shelf and within fifteen minutes start accepting chip and pin, debit and credit payments.”
That’s a first within North America. Dream achieved that through their patents and technology, which differentiates them from a point of sale consumer perspective. Their solid partnership with intuit, QuickBooks (QBO), the number one accounting software in the world, is fully integrated into their payment cloud and that allows a business to not only sell with Dream but have access to reports and analytics.
Their integration with QBO helps businesses run more efficiently by addressing the most complex aspects of running a business; Payments and Accounting. “For the thousands and thousands of businesses that use QuickBooks today, when they accept payment through Dream, those transactions automatically update their accounting,” says Ali. “That’s valuable to a small business owner because when you connect the two systems you have this powerful cloud accounting software as well as an innovative mobile point of sale solution and when they work together, it allows this company to manage their entire business from the cloud with updates in real time; saving business owners hours and hours of reconciliation in accounting every month.”
Where payments acceptance would traditionally take two to three weeks to get setup, Dream has simplified the process with their focus on small business users and making it easier for them to be more successful, and manage their business anywhere while leveraging mobile technology. Business owners invest a great deal of time and energy to build their business, Dream helps to protect their business by allowing them to also add a customized program through their partnership with TrueShield where clients can go online and register for insurance with affordable rates on demand.
Demands of the Next Generation
Dream is seeing tremendous growth from a platform perspective that allows payment processors to offer a mobile first solution to their customers without costly and inefficient development within their legacy environment. “Our core offerings and affordability of our services is garnering great interest from large financial institutions that don’t have the technology or the resources to build the solution we have so we are aligning these institutions with our payment cloud offering so they can bring services to market,” says Ho-Young. “The institutions that are adopting our solutions are a big part of our growth. With Dream, they finally have the freedom to support all the latest technologies/ hardware and the ability to better differentiate themselves from their competitors. This helps them to survive in what is becoming a commoditized market and meet the demands of next generation businesses.”
Service Providers are looking for turnkey customized solutions which are easy to integrate and help them to differentiate their service offering in the market. “We’re providing the user experiences that consumers are demanding today and bring products and services to market faster than they’ve ever been able to be before,” says Ali. “You’ll start to see more of the financial institutions come on board and offer better mobile solutions.
It’s also the change and expectations of consumers with the idea of mobile-based anytime, anywhere commerce. “It’s taking the payment or the experience from behind the counter and bringing it to the consumer which accounts for their overall experience,” says Ali.
Expansion into the U.S. Market
While Canada has been with chip cards for a few years now, the US is just rolling out with them; there is a need for merchants to either upgrade their legacy systems and payment terminals that were less secure (or sophisticated) and unable to support accepting chip cards as well contactless payments. “Recently, we attended the Venture Class Competition, a global FinTec competition that was held at Yale University,” says Ali. “We took first place out of about 200 companies and garnered a $2 million investment from the State of Connecticut. This has given us a nice soft landing into the US market where chip and pin based solution platforms have just been embraced.” The US is the right market for Dream and there is great demand which aligns with their global vision. They are currently setting up their operations in Connecticut right now.
This is a prime opportunity for Dream, with their solutions being affordable and acceptable that will allow businesses in the US to adopt the payment form factors of the future. “At the core, this is really about providing them with mobile solutions and technology that reduce the cost of selling whether that be eliminating expensive tethered cash registers or payment terminals allowing those businesses to go mobile and interact with their customers and deliver better customer experience,” says Ho-Young. “It’s not just about processing and accepting payments, it’s about understanding the data, the algorithms, the transactions, who your customers are, the partnerships. The business that signs up with Dream is able to access all of these value added services to help them grow.”
Simplifying payment acceptance, securely
Dream is providing the user experiences that consumers are demanding today and they are bringing products and services to market faster than they’ve ever been able to before. Financial institutions will continue to come on board with Dream so that they too, may offer better mobile solutions. “Our whole goal is to help businesses succeed,” says Ho-Young. “Businesses aren’t just looking for our payment solutions they’re looking for mobile devices. We are moving to support contactless Interac transactions as well, as part of our mobile-first strategy where people can just leave the house with just their phone and make device based transactions.”
Trusted consumer brands are now extending into the commercial space. “We’re seeing organizations such as Samsung bring value added services such as Samsung Pay that benefits both consumers and businesses,” says Ali. Dream has partnered with Samsung to deliver a complete solution which includes a Samsung mobile device, Dream Mobile Point of Sale device, and select app partners. This ’business in a box’ solution is set to launch March 2017 about the same time as the new Samsung A5 device.
With decades of banking experience under their belts successfully launching or scaling technology companies around the world, undeniably makes the team a ‘dream team’. “We are a team that’s fully committed to making it work while navigating through compliance and regulation amidst the sensitivities of the financial institutions,” says Ho-Young.
At Dream, 2017 is off to a great start. In January, Google featured them as part of their retail cloud exhibit at the National Retail Federation Conference. Dream will continue to expand their retail distribution this year as they continue to build on their app ecosystem by bringing in more third party relationships and allowing businesses to use more of the apps they love to use today.
