Scvngr, the Hub startup that uses mobile games to motivate consumers, has shifted focus to its rapidly expanding payment platform LevelUp, nearly doubling its monthly transaction amount in just four months.
"Scvngr (pronounced Scavenger) is doing really well," company founder and "Chief Ninja" Seth Priebatsch told the Herald. "It's growing, but it's not the core focus of the company anymore. Hasn't been for a while."
Make no mistake, Priebatsch — the oft-barefoot, orange-clad, work-obsessed 23-year-old entrepreneurial savant — has hardly abandoned his quest to "place a game layer on top of the world."
But the game has shifted. To money. Not earning it — moving it.
"We sort of made this transition — instead of using game mechanics to drive people to places, using game mechanics to drive people to places and then transact," Priebatsch said.
With a $21 million Series D funding bonanza under its belt, LevelUp is advancing its Interchange Zero mobile network, in which it takes away the processing fees that credit card companies charge. The business model is intended to give the company a cut of only the revenue increases it creates for merchants via special promotions and campaigns.
As for the customers, LevelUp creates loyalty discounts and programs that Priebatsch likens to the sunken rewards that the mobile generation is accustomed to seeing in video games.
It all relates to one goal: make the cost of moving money go away, taking with it the reviled credit card interchange that costs businesses between three and six cents on the dollar.
"We can add a lot more value if we only take a portion of the marginal revenue increase we can create, and we can make a lot more money than if we charge merchants for just the utility of moving money," Priebatsch said.
For someone who claims a complete lack of interest in his own money, Priebatsch certainly has a knack for making it, with 3,800 merchants in 32 cities and transactions expected to approach $4 million a month.
"The cost to move a dollar from point A to point B needs to be free," he said. "Like Google made the idea of moving information totally free and created this entirely weird spawn of awesome companies and awesome things, we look at the same thing happening with money. As we are able to move money cheaper and cheaper, it will move faster, will go more places and there will be more money moving."
To Priebatsch, that's beating the game.
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