While everyone is taking their deserved break, the startups of the Visa Innovation Program are using this time to grow. And we continue to present their innovative solutions in our “Meet the fintechs” blog series. In Part 5, we are excited to present two startups from Turkey – meet Qumpara and Alternatif SuperApp.
At a glance:
The Problem
- CPG brands needs a reward mechanism that could give them freedom from retailer cashier systems.
- Traditional trade promotion mechanisms cost money and time.
- Price promos are losing its momentum. Brands & Retailers are struggling to influence shoppers' path to purchase.
- There is a gap between the shoppers and the consumer brands.
- Shopper Data is too cluttered. Most of the data are claim-based and not real-time.
The Solution
Qumpara is a platform that rewards shoppers with cash back, discount offers or instant rewards. With its receipt recognition system, Qumpara brings online capabilities to offline shopping, delivering loyalty and instant win solutions to consumer goods (CG) brands. The transactional data collected from receipts, helps CG brands to understand and develop deeper relationships with shoppers to drive desired purchase behavior. Powered by rich, first-party purchase data, collected in real time from real shoppers, Qumpara drives activations that deliver measurable impact.
Why is this important?
Qumpara puts money back in shoppers pocket without coupons or discount codes. They just scan a receipt from their grocery shopping and stores, and start earning digital rewards or direct cash back. While shoppers use Qumpara to save money on their daily buys, it tracks the item level information and lets brands and retailer partners utilize direct consumer relationships to leverage total brand presence, developing deeper relationships with shoppers. Having a truly consumer-centric approach to data changes how consumer goods (CG) brands and retailers operate.
Founder Blitz
In order to learn even more intriguing insights, our team met with Qumpara’s founders for a quick “founder blitz”.
1. What inspired you to start Qumpara?
We created Qumpara to disrupt the trade marketing ecosystem. We could see how brands were struggling to understand shopper behavior and how they are unable to create the right incentive to the right consumer. Qumpara erases pain-points for both shoppers and brands creating a direct meeting point for them. We give brands actionable insight about shoppers and create meaningful marketing mechanisms to influence their behavior. For shoppers, we make their grocery shopping journey more enjoyable and profitable.
3. What is the biggest challenge you have come against since you established Qumpara?
Macroeconomic issues like inflation, interest rates, geopolitics, and market volatility are impacting all brands and shrinking budgets. At Qumpara, we have always put our focus on dreaming up new ways to make our product more useful, more rewarding and fun for consumers, and more valuable for brands. Even in the most difficult environment, we were happy to see the more rewarding we get, the more consumers we have reached, and the brands have thrived.
2. What is your next big milestone?
We have proven our business model in Turkey and willing to expand our business abroad. We believe upcoming global economical conditions generate an opportunity for Qumpara, since high inflation is a driving point for a business promising “reward” and “cash-back” to shoppers.
4. What does success look like for Qumpara?
We dream Qumpara to be the number one shopping companion in the region. From discovery of new products or brands for their everyday shopping, to the payment process, and the recurrent purchases or visits, Qumpara used as a unique bridge between digital and physical shopping experience is our goal.
At a glance:
The Problem
As a result of the industry’s ambition to have the ability to make apps and receive payments, every brand is eager to make a digital wallet application of its own. However, this situation causes serious expenses for companies and results in individual customers having dozens of applications on their phones. The application of a coffee shop, the loyalty application of an oil company, and the digital wallet application of a stationery store… it is both tiring and far from reliable for the end user that they all have to be downloaded separately, their passwords must be kept, and their credit card information must be given to all of them.
The Solution
Creating a marketplace by revealing a ready-made solution for all brands in a single application is one of the groundbreaking benefits of Alternatif SuperApp to both corporate and individual customers. Apart from this, showing the clearest locations of the branches of the companies, enabling wallet sharing, and most importantly, offering campaigns for all brands can be counted among the other benefits.
Why is this important?
Giving brands a digital wallet infrastructure that enables them to become fintech and making it free is admirable in terms of the acceleration and efficiency of the process. Unlike normal payment methods, it allows businesses to get to know their customers better, so they can offer them more appropriate and more relevant campaigns, and this enables individual customers to encounter a more personal experience for themselves and increase brand loyalty.
Founder Blitz
Meet Alternatif SuperApp’s founder and learn more about the vision and next milestones for the company in our “founder blitz”.
1. What inspired you to start Alternatif SuperApp?
We had a successful example of this idea. We made a wallet app for Havaist (a transportation company for airports). We realized that we could apply the experience we gained here in different sectors. Afterwards, we predicted that it would be more efficient to gather all these brands in one place instead of making separate applications. Then, we decided to make a marketplace for many brands from all sectors in one app: Alternatif SuperApp.
3. What is the biggest challenge you have come against since you established Alternatif SuperApp?
Convincing brands that we gave it for free was one of the first big challenges we faced. We can say that it was also a difficult process for brands to be convinced that they could get paid by taking part in this little-known application. Apart from this, there were difficulties in virtual POS processes with banks in the early stage of the application.
2. What is your next big milestone?
First of all, we want to establish the same system in countries such as Azerbaijan and Qatar. Being able to implement Alternatif SuperApp in a market outside of Turkey is one of tour biggest goals.
4. What does success look like for Alternatif SuperApp?
Being the most preferred application among payment and loyalty applications in Turkey and being chosen by hundreds of brands is the success dream of Alternatif SuperApp. We aim to enable a company from any sector anywhere in the world to use its own digital wallet in the Alternatif application in as little as 1 hour.