Challenge

me&u aims to help hospitality venues get “bums on seats and drive sales,” as Daniel Evans, the company’s chief product officer, puts it. From there, guests use me&u’s QR code product to order and pay on their mobile phones, giving them a great experience and encouraging more spending. This flexible ordering and payment solution rose in popularity in the aftermath of COVID-19 lockdowns, as restaurants, bars, and breweries sought ways to reopen while addressing diners’ safety concerns.

To take advantage of international growth opportunities, the Australian company needed to upgrade its payment technology to meet its financial, legal, and strategic needs, which included faster payouts for venues, automated reconciliation, help with compliance, and easy-to-launch product integrations. After considering several providers, me&u selected Stripe based on its ability to act as a true partner as the company scaled—offering both best-in-class payment technology and a collaborative working relationship. “Ultimately, Stripe was able to meet us on the ability to scale rapidly, expand internationally, and meet our other needs,” Evans said.

me&u began by integrating Connect, which Evans calls the “linchpin that holds the me&u platform together.” Connect facilitates and monetizes platform payments, allowing me&u to onboard new venues instantly and pay them quickly. Stripe Terminal allows me&u venues to accept in-person payments in over a dozen currencies, and Radar helps the company prevent fraud. me&u also uses Data Pipeline to easily access its Stripe data and unlock business insights.

With those elements in place, me&u started thinking about developing a companion to its core QR code solution—one that would help venues further optimize their operations and empower servers on the venue floor.

Solution

While the me&u team was building what would become Crew, its mobile app to manage the guest experience on the fly, the Stripe team approached me&u about the impending launch of Tap to Pay on iPhone. That development inspired me&u to add a new capability to Crew: contactless payment acceptance that would allow servers to drive extra sales.

This solution can be applied to a wide range of hospitality venues, but one segment that saw immediate success was competitive socializing venues like indoor mini golf. Without Tap to Pay on iPhone, if a guest ordered a round of beers from a roaming server, the server would have to walk back to a central location to input the order in the POS, find the guests—who had potentially moved to the next hole—with a payment terminal to collect payment, walk back to get the drinks, and then try to find the guests again.

With Tap to Pay on iPhone, the server can take the order and immediately accept in-person, contactless payments right on their iPhone—from physical debit and credit cards to Apple Pay and other digital wallets—with no extra hardware needed. The mini-golfers get their drinks more quickly, and with less interruption, and the servers spend less time tracking them down.

Adding contactless payment acceptance to Crew eliminated a step for servers and created a frictionless ordering and payment experience for guests. “I think about good payments like I think about good design: it should be near invisible to the end user,” said Evans. “If they’re not thinking about the payment experience, then we’ve done a great job.”

After a two-month implementation process, me&u launched Crew with Tap to Pay on iPhone in Australia in early 2024, then began scaling mid-year. To date, venues are evenly split between those that supply iPhones for staff use and those whose servers use their own phones. Both groups have found success in providing servers with branded phone cases or lanyards for the iPhones as a way to facilitate adoption of Tap to Pay on iPhone. “That makes it feel more relatable, because the consumer is not necessarily incredibly familiar with the idea of taking a payment via a phone yet,” Evans said.

Results

Sales growth for me&u customers

Venues using Crew have increased their sales through me&u by up to 60%. This figure represents a completely new revenue stream for venues, whose servers are now able to upsell guests on the venue floor with Tap to Pay on iPhone.

Some venues are testing incentivizing staff based on the sales they generate through Crew and Tap to Pay on iPhone—for instance, paying servers a percentage of all the Crew sales they capture in a shift. “They’ll then focus on selling high-gross-profit items, so giving 5% to their staff is a win for everybody involved,” Evans said.

Fast implementation in new markets

me&u launched Crew with Tap to Pay for iPhone in the UK toward the end of 2024. Turning on the contactless payment acceptance solution halfway around the world from me&u’s Australia headquarters was a simple process. “It was only a small amount of work to launch into a new market,” Evans said. “It was quite painless.”

Enhanced adoption by me&u venues

The me&u team was confident that the operational tools baked into Crew would make venue managers’ lives easier. But the addition of revenue-generating capabilities with Tap to Pay on iPhone made it a much easier sell. “They generate more sales as a result of it, so they’re willing to invest in it,” Evans said.

Since me&u launched Crew, its venues continue to identify opportunities to boost the bottom line. In addition to roaming food and beverage sales, venues are using Crew and Tap to Pay on iPhone to sell branded merchandise and to shorten queues by serving people straight out of the line. “Our customers are coming up with their own use cases for how to use this product every day,” Evans said.