HyperJar is a world-first payments technology embedded in a digital wallet. It’s the only app that lets consumers put aside money for a specific purpose, point to specific brands, and optimize their spending process. Chris Lowrie, COO of HyperJar, was at the roots of this idea and watched as it became a reality.
In the world of financial technology, innovation is the name of the game, and standing out in a crowded market can be quite the challenge. HyperJar is a digital wallet that helps people plan and navigate their journey from depositing money to spending it, digitizing, capturing, and rewarding their intent. Customers can effectively manage their finances by using digital “jam jars.” These digital containers allow them to not only allocate funds but also share these financial spaces with friends and family. Moreover, users can seamlessly link these digital jars to their preferred brands, and even make purchases directly from these accounts via a debit card or their mobile devices.
This enables brands to connect with their customers in entirely new and transparent ways, fostering a deeper understanding of their clientele, both existing and potential. As a result, businesses can craft offers that are truly appealing, engaging customers far earlier in the marketing process than ever before.
Chris Lowrie worked for another business that spun up new technical projects, and HyperJar was one of the projects that they were looking at getting off the ground. He has been there since the embodiment of this idea and was happy to share his experience with us.
HyperJar takes pride in offering a genuinely free service to its users. They don’t burden customers with monthly fees or interest-based lending. Instead, their innovative business model focuses on connecting merchants with their customer base, where merchants pay HyperJar for this service.
HyperJar`s key features are designed to make spending go further by helping everyone plan, budget, share and control their funds and by delivering easy access to highly valuable rewards and services. Chris Lowrie highlights three key pillars to achieve this goal:
1. Separation of spending money into separate pools (jars) and the rules that can be placed on this to control spending.
2. Our merchant rewards engine, which includes our unique ability to prepay to merchants as part of the planning process.
3. Our sharing functionality allows friends and families to share jars amongst themselves to enable joint planning and spending.
In the realm of data security and privacy, HyperJar sets the gold standard. They never share personal data with merchants or partners for marketing purposes. Instead, they utilize anonymized cohorts for tailored messaging. Their rigorous security measures include industry-standard encryption for data in transit and at rest, in addition to regular penetration testing and vulnerability assessments.
However, their journey has not been without its challenges. The global pandemic, COVID-19, posed significant barriers for HyperJar. It impacted every aspect of their business simultaneously, from funding shortages to plummeting customer spending and merchant hesitancy in pursuing new initiatives. The shift to a fully remote workforce, though facilitated by their existing tech infrastructure, presented its own set of challenges. As a result, the team had to adapt and tackle each obstacle one step at a time.
– As an early stage company, the inability to be in the same place to talk through issues was tough – we all got sick of Teams meetings.
But such challenges only make HyperJar stronger and more experienced, ready to continue growing and launching new features. To do so, they follow a data-driven and agile approach. They start with a hypothesis and substantiate it with quantitative data. Moreover, they engage a panel of super users, ensuring that new features align closely with customer needs and desires.
Looking ahead, HyperJar is focussed on creating additional, unique reward types that help build stronger relationships and loyalty between merchants and their customers and continuing to develop the control parameters that our customers can use for their planning and spending.
Chris Lowrie`s unique fintech experience makes him believe that the role of fintech companies evolving in the next few years is to stay nimble and keep innovating to incumbent banks to improve their service offerings.
– I also see Financial inclusion as a key space where Fintech’s can still make a big difference, using their lower cost base to provide affordable and accessible financial products and services to underserved populations using mobile technology to reach rural and low-income communities, and the use of data analytics to identify and target underserved populations.
For HyperJar, the focus remains on innovating new management and control functionality to empower customers to take charge of their income planning and spending. They treat spending as a new asset class that should be actively managed, much like any other asset a consumer possesses.
Chris believes that another important trend in fintech right now is the rise of embedded finance. It allows businesses to offer their customers a wider range of payment options without having to become a financial institution themselves. It can also help businesses to improve their customer experience by making it easier and more convenient for customers to pay for goods and services.
– HyperJar’s whole service is built around this concept, allowing customers to pre-pay to merchants they use, plan their spending and then, at the point of sale, everything happens automatically based on the customers choices.
For those seeking a career in FinTech, Chris Lowrie offers valuable advice:
– Be open-minded about the role you go for – get in at any level and work to learn the business and look for opportunities as the company expands. We have had members of our customer service team go on to be in data analytics, or head of talent management, or even product designer.
As a start-up enthusiast himself, the COO of HyperJar also believes that this environment is the best, especially compared to his own experience as a part of a corporation. Of course you need to be ready for the uncertainty in terms of the product success, your revenue and a very high possibility of having to work on different roles at the beginning. But the benefits still prevail:
– As long as you can manage these factors, then you will learn so much, see the difference you are making and have a degree of freedom that you just cannot experience in a large corporation.
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