Zenobia Pay – A mission to build an alternative to high-fee card networks

Summary

Why we're open sourcing our payments platform Since Februray, Teddy and I have worked tirelessly on Zenobia Pay. Our mission: build an alternative to high-fee card networks (Visa, Mastercard) using bank transfers as payments. We were super excited by FedNow, the Federal Reserve's instant transfer rail, which inspired us to quit our jobs and do this full time. We thought, let's build QR code payments, like Pix or UPI or AliPay, but for the US. And we did! We built an instant clearing, mobile first, pay-by-bank network. However, we failed to get any adoption besides thieves and mobsters. We tried cold outreach, door to door sales, and meeting with every friend of a friend in our lives. But after months of zero growth and $20,000 stolen, we've decided we are not the right people to make this happen. Too young, too unconnected to drive any adoption. That said, this is not an impossible task, just a difficult one. We are open sourcing Zenobia Pay with the hope that it will save time for somebody else who wants to pick up this mission. If this sounds like you: great. Here is all the code. That said, with payments, you need more than just code to go live. You need a licensed banking partner. We purchased a SaaS solution through the fintech Orum.io, which has a partnership with another fintech, which has a partership with a bank. Orum was acquired by Stripe, though, and is shutting down its service. You will need to migrate to a different banking provider, like Trice or Column. Who wants this? Over the course of building this, we went through three iterations of who we targeted. The product stayed more or less the same, but the customer changed. Iteration 1: SMBs First iteration is the obvious one: give this service to small businesses who have low net margins. If you have a 3% net margin, saving 2% on interchange nearly doubles your profits! However, this has a few problems: Problem 1: Integration. In person sales means you need a POS or POS partner. This dramatically incr...