Today Blackbird, a restaurant loyalty startup founded by former Resy and Eater founder Ben Leventhal, announced the launch of Blackbird Pay, a new restaurant payment network.
Powered by the company’s new blockchain, Blackbird Flynet, Blackbird Pay is a payment system that Blackbird says will charge less than traditional payment platforms (2% on average compared to 3.5% for systems such as Toast). The system allows customers to play with the Blackbird app using their debit or credit card within the app, or to use a combination of $FLY (Blackbird’s native loyalty points) and a card.
While the company emerged from the game primarily positioned as a next-gen loyalty platform company, Leventhal told The Spoon that payments have always been on the roadmap.
“We’ve been talking from the very start about the importance of giving restaurants tools to bring fees down to increase the fidelity of the data they get customer to customer,” said Leventhal. “And we strongly believe that pay is a huge part of that equation. We’re launching a payments product that allows restaurants to transfer funds between consumers and restaurants much more cheaply than they can using legacy rails.”
While Blackbird Pay marks the company’s entry into payments, one of its key differentiators is the tools it gives restaurant operators to enhance their loyalty programs. Once the customer taps in using the proprietary Blackbird NFC puck, the restaurant is notified that the guest is a Blackbird member. The customer’s dining profile includes a proprietary Guest Value Score and information about their dining history and VIP status. This enables restaurants to offer personalized perks, benefits, points, exclusive access, and other tailored hospitality options to entice and reward their guests.
In addition to launching Blackbird Pay, the company has also added additional communication features and enhancements around building membership programs. According to the company, Sra. Martinez launched a founding members program prior to its Miami opening, which enabled new members to gain access to tables ahead of reservations opening and receive free cocktails and amuse bouche while dining.
According to Leventhal, the new system isn’t a “rip and replace” for the existing point of sale system, but instead, one that is a ‘net new service.’
“We don’t want to introduce new complexity and introduce a new system that restaurants have to train up on,” said Leventhal. “Blackbird is built to integrate with those systems, and implementation for the restaurant is pretty lightweight.”
While a number of startups that launched during the crypto boom have either scaled back or pivoted, Blackbird has remained focused on utilizing blockchain as an underlying enabler for new features. But, as Levanthal has said from the time of launch, the goal is to enable those new features while making the user experience of customers and restaurants utilizing the platform as simple and abstracted from the underlying technology as possible.
“From a technology standpoint, we are using the blockchain to move tokens from consumer wallets to restaurant wallets,” Leventhal said. “And we’re using the blockchain to do it in a secure and scalable way. And to the extent that consumers care about that, or for that matter, restaurants care about that, you can peel back the onion, so to speak, and explore how that works on the platform. We’re certainly not hiding it. But in terms of the product experience, it’s not front and center.”
You can watch the full conversation with Ben Leventhal in the video below.
