Local Startup Develops Platform for Tipping with Payment Card

Payment cards, payment digitization and services such as Apple and Google Pay have made our everyday lives considerably easier. Crinkled, old bills (often with a tear in the middle) and a handful of coins we get as change, which then overburden our wallets, are now a thing of the past. Furthermore, it is far easier to control one’s finances through one of the banking applications than counting the cash and keeping it somewhere hidden.

Still, new technologies do not favor everybody. As, in most cases, hospitality facilities do not provide the possibility of tipping with a payment card, waiters are often left without an adequate award for their kindness and dedication to the guests. You have certainly found yourself in a situation where you were extraordinarily satisfied with the service at a restaurant or a café, but not having any cash on you to tip the waiter. Also, if you are the owner of a hospitality facility, you must have noticed that your tips have become considerably lower since people started mostly using cards and digital wallets.

Having realized that the official data also show that people use payment cards increasingly often, making tipping impossible through this form of payment, a team of people from various fields – from IT, through marketing and sales, to hospitality, decided to launch the hvala.tips platform which would solve this problem in a simple and practical way.

The platforms functions in a very simple way: in a prominent place within the hospitality facility, the guests will see a QR code, which also acts as a reminder that they should leave a tip. By scanning the code, they enter the waiter’s profile, where they set the tip and the manner of payment, which they then make through their mobile phone.

– We spent over a year developing the technical solution and adapting it to the legal frameworks. The majority of the time and energy was put in working with financial experts and lawyers, so that we would adapt the platform to the local legislation and ensure that everything functioned in a legal manner. I think that was the biggest challenge – Bozidar Kramzer, the COO at hvala.tips, said for Netokracija.

The founder of the company is Ivan Ivanovic, a serial entrepreneur with lots of experience in IT and sales, who ran several companies in Russia and the Baltic countries. The hvala.tips team consists of seven employees, who come from the fields of IT, sales, marketing and hospitality.

Their main tasks are to maintain and develop the platform, as well to put the product on the market.