Inspiration at InspirePay
Not everyone in Margaritaville is wasting away.
In fact, it was the beverage of choice of Mark Fischer when he was refining an idea for simplifying online payments months ago.
“There were multiple aha moments,” Fischer, founder of online payments venture InspirePay, tells Bank Innovation.
Beyond a beverage eureka, the need for creating a service that helps people receive payments online more efficiently was obvious in Fischer’s eyes because of feedback he’d been getting. He recalls receiving requests from individuals who wanted to be able to accept payments without becoming full-blown merchants. To meet their unfulfilled needs, InspirePay was born and officially hit the market last December.
At its core, InspirePay is a payments aggregator that lets merchants offer a variety of payment options online through a branded interface. People — Fischer’s preferred term to merchants — build pay-me pages at InspirePay, a task that he says is as simple as creating a Facebook page. The first account is free. Users decide which payment options they will accept, and to date, those options include the likes of PayPal, Dwolla, and Stripe, among others. To receive payments, InspirePay users can send their URLs to whomever they want to pay up.
Though InspirePay is a relatively new offering, more than $100,000 was transferred via InspirePay in its first five weeks of debuting. To date, users are everyone from web designers to attorneys to nonprofits to college students and are coming to the platform for reasons that range from straight up invoicing to splitting a dinner with a friend.
“We haven’t found a vertical yet,” Fischer says.
InspirePay plans to continue to partner up with payment providers that “must be thinking about the future,” Fischer tells Bank Innovation. “We are committed to getting as many [payment] options to end users.”
BUDDYING UP
Perhaps Dwolla is easy to accept in one scenario, but not in another, he says. To ensure a person can actually pay up, InspirePay hopes to aggregate as many payment providers as possible. And for the most part, payment providers are happy to integrate into InspirePay because buddying up only means higher usage rates for them, Fischer explains. Plus, some of the providers, like PayPal, boast open APIs to help them thrive.
Broadly, better integration among payment players is essential as innovation continues to develop and the market becomes more and more saturated.
“Someone needs to master diversity,” he says, explaining electronic wallets tend to be somewhat closed to date. “Huge brands have relationships with huge networks.”
His vision is to keep InspirePay technology open. In fact, on InspirePay’s immediate roadmap is opening up its API in the next three to six months.
“That’s our big goal,” says Fischer. “I can only imagine what people will create.”
