Mihai Draghici, Founder & CEO at Paybyface explained to Daily NewsPK how they are making online transaction faster and completely hands-free and providing merchants with a simple e-commerce capabilities, payment gamifications and a digital advertising network.
1. What led you to create ‘Pay by face’?
I come from almost 20 years of software engineering and launching startups worldwide in India, Canada, Mexico, USA and Europe. I also previously worked with former SVP of Visa and former Chief System Architect of Visa several years ago in the USA and then I moved to Bucharest, Romania in Jan 2018 only to find out about Open Banking and PSD2…so combined that new knowledge with previous experiences and my international startup know-how to launch PayByFace, after which I obtained an EUIPO trademark for it. And the rest is history…
2. When was it founded?
The initial PayByFace SRL company was founded last year in Nov 2019 in Bucharest, Romania. We recently moved our headquarters to Amsterdam and are creating our global holding company next based in Amsterdam. Our Amsterdam company will become our management and operations center, and the Romanian company will be our engineering and product teams.
3. What is the core service/solution you are providing?
The core system that took me over 2 years to build single-handedly is the ultra-scalable platform that makes PayByFace app even possible…it is our proprietary biometric on-demand data distribution system that pairs with a patented highly accurate face recognition engine which is hardware agnostic and very light-weight architecture, all hosted in both Amazon and Azure cloud.
The value proposition we can deliver to retail merchants with our PayByFace application is to provide merchants with simple e-commence capabilities, frictionless loyalty programs, payments gamification and an exclusive out-of-home digital advertising network for them to promote their business around town and easily track conversion and generate more revenues.
4. What are the pain points that you are targeting and what is the key differentiating factor from similar offerings?
The key pain point which we are targeting right now is the post-COVID19 situation of merchants not being able to generate the traffic and revenues pre-COVID because there just simply aren’t as many people on the street and inside shops. So with PayByFace we can offer a much faster checkout experience that is completely hands-free interaction by the customer at point of sale. Also, since most businesses are turning towards online buyers and home delivery we have a module in our app that allows any merchant that is on-boarded can quickly and easily add e-commerce “click and collect” features for their customers.
5. What are the parameters to measure client satisfaction?
Currently we are doing customer surveys right in the stores where we have installed our PayByFace app to collect direct feedback and we monitor several conversion and usage KPIs on our system dashboards so we can constantly adapt and improve the system as we continue to scale up our operations worldwide.
6. What is your future outlook and what do you stand to achieve by next year?
Our future outlook is to improve our UI/UX and do a complete redesign of our apps design to be more modern and give better controls to the users over their digital identity and e-wallet functionality and security. We also want to continue to refine our business model and USP to stay ahead of the competition coming from China and other areas of the world where more and more startups are popping up who also see this as a huge opportunity! We are also fund raising right now a pre-seed round and any interested investors can reach me at mihai@paybyface.io for details.
