For many restaurant patrons, paying the bill often means a lot of waiting. To improve the restaurant payment experience, Chief Business Officer Ramy Omar cofounded qlub, a platform that provides QR code and contactless payments for restaurants, allowing diners to pay in seconds.
By making it easy for customers to view and pay their bill, the Dubai-based company, founded in 2021, helps restaurants in the United States, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, Malaysia, and South Korea save up to 16 minutes per table, freeing staff to focus on the dining experience instead of shuttling paper bills and credit cards back and forth.
Reinventing the restaurant checkout experience
When building the platform, Omar knew payments would need to work as smoothly for qlub’s engineers as for restaurant owners, servers, and guests. That meant he needed to find a unified payment provider that could be integrated quickly without pulling focus away from product development.
From its launch, qlub has relied on Stripe to power the entire flow of payments across its platform. By simplifying restaurant onboarding and unifying payments across channels, qlub has scaled to more than 3,000 restaurant brands worldwide in less than 5 years.
The best thing is how Stripe has enabled our growth as a startup. When we expand to new markets, we use the exact same integration everywhere, making scaling so easy. It was easy to start and reliable at scale; that combination is hard to find in the payments world.
qlub implemented its initial Stripe Payments setup within two days, allowing it to launch its minimal viable product faster.
“When we were starting, we needed a payment solution that required minimal time and effort from our product and tech teams. Stripe’s clear documentation and fast onboarding process were decisive factors. Our entity was approved within two hours, compared to months with traditional providers,” said Omar.
With Stripe Connect, qlub can quickly onboard restaurants, manage compliance and KYC requirements, and route payments without delay. Within 2 months of adding Stripe, qlub onboarded 70 restaurants. Today, new restaurants can launch in as little as a day, providing rapid time to value.
qlub uses Stripe Terminal to bring payments directly to the table. Staff can present the bill and accept payment on the spot using mobile terminals, eliminating errors and saving time. Tap to Pay lets restaurants accept contactless payments, allowing patrons to pay instantly with an iPhone or Android device.
With our integrated Stripe Terminal solution running on SUNMI [POS] devices, staff now spend less time running back and forth and more time focusing on customer service. Servers can go directly to a customer’s table and print the bill from the terminal, with all items listed. They can immediately process payment, which saves significant time and creates a smoother experience for customers.
With all transactions flowing into a single dashboard, qlub helps restaurants see a complete, real-time picture of their revenue. That shift freed owners from spreadsheets and gave them more time to focus on their businesses.
“Restaurants have major reconciliation headaches. We’ve had restaurant owners tell us they used to stay up past midnight trying to reconcile their books because the settlements were all different. Having unified payments through Stripe means they can access everything at the click of a button,” said Omar.
A foundation for future growth
By using Stripe to combine online QR payments and in-person terminal payments into one system, qlub helps restaurants gain richer insights into how guests spend so they can streamline operations, improve staff retention, and build closer relationships with their patrons.
“The features we roll out—like tipping prompts and financial reporting—are based on studying the data to make sure restaurants are getting more information that helps them run their businesses better,” said Hardik Batra, Managing Director of qlub Singapore and SEA. “In the past, payments were just a way to settle the bill. Now it’s clear they’re a bridge between restaurants and their customers.”
As qlub looks ahead to new markets, Omar is confident that Stripe will provide a solid foundation for growth.
It is difficult to find a partner that makes tech, product, operations, and finance teams happy—and that happened with Stripe. All of our teams find Stripe easy to use. Payments are a critical part of your business; every efficiency you can gain matters tremendously to your bottom line.
