How Mobile Payments And Apps Are Changing The Game

By Matt Pillar, chief editor

A new breed of developers is bringing fast, feature-rich mobile payment apps to market. Does it spell opportunity for the channel?

Matthew Suber and Daniel Dorfman had a chronic problem. It came to a head one night in 2013 as they were wrapping up dinner with friends in an Atlanta restaurant. They were ready to pay their bill and move on for the evening, but instead they sat waiting as their server struggled to split the bill. Suber and Dorfman are young. They’re examples of the new millennial consumer — tech savvy and wholly dissatisfied with the status quo. They couldn’t get their minds around the fact that in 2013, so many restaurants, bars, and nightclubs lacked a solution to an age-old problem: processing complex split payments in a timely and efficient manner. There was a better way, and with help from their friends and Georgia Tech alums Randy Etheredge and Jimmy Patel, they set out to develop it. By 2014, they had launched Split, an application released to the market — and the channel — in June, 2015.