Contactless payments and the proliferation of cash apps have seen a move towards a cashless society in recent years, and this has been accelerated by the pandemic. In tandem with this trend towards paperless money, three young entrepreneurs from Galway are leading the way in developing paperless receipts.
Receipt Relay is a mobile app that allows people to use a QR code at the point of sale to download a digital receipt to their phone. This technology aims to bring an end to lost receipts, reduce the environmental cost of transactions, and make budgeting and financing easier too.
Joe Hennigan, the company's co-founder and chief marketing officer, came up with the idea along with a school friend as part of a competition while the pair were attending college, and decided to develop the concept further when they won.
Mr Hennigan, from Corofin, who is currently taking a break from studying aeronautical engineering in University of Limerick to work on the company, noticed how difficult it was to keep track of paper receipts when he found himself needing to retain them for work-related expenses a few years ago.
"I took a year out between secondary school and college and worked in construction, and had to keep receipts for reimbursement," he recalled. "Working up and down the country, it’s easy to lose a receipt. It’s a very messy system. For every card payment, there has to be a receipt printed. We are trying to reduce waste for retailers too."
When the opportunity arose to enter Fidelity International's Fintech for Good competition in college in 2019, Hennigan and friend Sean Finnegan, from Sylane, now studying electronic and computer engineering at NUI Galway, decided to develop the concept of an electronic receipt app. After pitching to a team of international judges, their idea was chosen as the competition winner, and the award money that came with this achievement afforded them the opportunity to bring their concept to market.
"Myself and Sean had been friends since secondary school," he said. "We won that competition and got funding from that. We were up against business students, and myself and Sean had an engineering background, so we were shocked when we won. Then, from there, we searched for a programmer. We were just entry level engineers so we had no development background. Covid was just starting at the time. We sent an email to every computer society in every college campus looking for a developer, and Luke Slemon has been on board since."
Slemon, a native of Claregalway and a recent graduate of electronic and computer engineering at NUI Galway, got on board as Receipt Relay's chief technology officer.
All three recognised the limitations of paper receipts, which represented a significant pain point for people who need to keep track of them. The environmental cost was also a concern. Most receipts, particularly those with a shiny surface, cannot be recycled, making them a significant single-use paper product. Paper receipts require the felling of some 65 million trees globally every year, and contribute billions of pounds of CO2 to the atmosphere, yet most are binned without a second glance.
"Engineering gives you the building blocks to solve problems," Hennigan said. "We’re all from engineering backgrounds so when we find a a problem we attack it from every angle. Luke is an extremely intelligent person. We were in the idea phase when he came on board and then it became tangible and we began our development. That was April 2020. Since Luke came on board we’ve been working consistently, and we’ve been balancing it between college and the work."
With a working product now in beta phase, Hennigan has taken a year out of college to focus on the company, while Finnegan is working at the company as part of his university programme. Customers can now use the app when visiting Treat Cafe in Claregalway, and it will be rolled out to several other businesses in Galway in the coming months.
"We got an integration with a Galway-based ePOS [electronic point of sale] system," Hennigan said. "We have a partnership with JBM Merit in Claregalway. We’ve been working with them for the best part of a year now, and we have a trial going on in Treat Cafe, behind SuperValu in Claregalway. Our software went live there before Christmas. When you go in and buy coffee, or lunch, or tea, there’s a QR code and you scan that, and the e-receipt will go into your phone."
Things have moved fast for the startup in recent months. It was accepted onto phase 2 of GMIT's New Frontiers entrepreneurial development programme in June of last year, and following a visit to Web Summit in Lisbon in November, all three founders were featured in the Irish Independent 30 Under 30, a who's who of young entrepreneurs to watch.
Now, as the company enters its third year, Receipt Relay runs out the Portershed, and has just secured funding under Enterprise Ireland's Competitive Start Fund, designed to support startups with the capacity to succeed in global markets. Plans are afoot to roll out the technology to more local companies, and the future is looking bright and, of course, paperless.
"We’ve been talking to retailers, and the increase in the number of people using cards is crazy, it has gone up to 79 or 80 per cent of people," Hennigan said. "Everything is going paperless. The paper part of it [receipts] hasn’t changed in the last 20 years. It’s not an easy problem to solve, how do you make it a business model?"
Going paperless provides significant benefits to customers - having all your receipts in one app makes them easy to track, which is particularly useful for recoupable expenses or big ticket items which come with a warranty. It also makes budgeting and tracking finances easier. For retailers, the system is more cost effective than printing receipts, provides a wealth of useful customer experience insights, and helps to reduce a company's carbon footprint.
"A lot of people are indifferent about receipts because they don’t use them, but for people who do use them it’s a very strong pain point," Hennigan said. "It can help people keep ahead of their finances, and cut down on paper waste as well. The life cycle of paper receipts is fairly limited, you can’t upcycle them."
With an immediate focus on expanding the technology to Galway companies in the coming months, the company ultimately plans to roll out nationally and globally.
"Galway is a very good place for starting up, especially the college," Hennigan said. "The Ideas Lab in NUI Galway have been super helpful with meetings, warming up some cold emails for us. They’ve been very helpful to us. Myself and Sean are working on this full time, I've taken a leave of absence from my course and Sean is working in our company as his course placement, so now we're in the Portershed in Galway to work on this full time. It's a cool facility."
To find out more about Receipt Relay see www.receiptrelay.com
