Author : Aurélie Boob
TiQuest is a young start up hosted at the Luxembourg-City Incubator which was created a few weeks before the first lockdown in 2020. Not easy when offering a dematerialized receipt and data management technology to coffee and restaurant owners…
Photo: Christoph Bruckner and Alexandre Marquet hope that the reopening of restaurants and cafes will finally allow them to deploy their solution / Credits © Kaori Anne Jolliffe
Alexandre Marquet, 30 years old, co-founder of TiQuest recounts the days of how it all started…
The adventure started in January 2020 with an interesting concept: to propose a dematerialized ticket offer via a box connected to the merchant’s printer that digitizes and collects tickets. Contrary to what already exists, the receipt of the ticket does not require the customer to leave his contact details. “It’s linked to the payment card. The application connects directly to the user’s bank and will read the transactions, but cannot generate them directly.”
“When the transaction appears, TiQuest instantly sends the digital receipt to the user’s smartphone. “This is all thanks to the European PSD2 regulation that introduced the concept of Open Banking. In addition, the analysis of the anonymized data recorded via this link will allow the owner of the establishment to better forecast inventory and make decisions based on recognized information rather than instinct.
Data that they would not have access to without the solution. “The idea is to transpose into physical commerce the best practices related to the processing of online business data. Combining the anonymized individual data from each point of sale to extract information and create collective intelligence available to all,” says Alexandre Marquet.
“The idea is to transpose into physical commerce the best practices related to the processing of online business data.”
The pivot that could overcome the crisis
At the summer reopening, all coffee shops offered a digitalized menu in the form of a QR code that brought the consumer to a more or less readable PDF. TiQuest then had the idea of offering restaurants a free app that easily generates “clean, readable and optimized for a smartphone screen” digital menus. To go further, the startup also offers the consumer the possibility to order and pay at the table (via Digicash), while of course offering the digital receipt. This is a way to hook the market with a timely tool to build loyalty and then offer them the packages of the initial model. And rebelot! While the deployment was in progress, the coffee shops closed down for a second confinement at the end of November, which is still going on…”.
TiQuest integrated into the Fit 4 Start acceleration program last January. “The Luxembourg authorities have postponed the reopening of the cafés and restaurants scheduled for mid-May. Horeca professionals asked for an early reopening of the terraces already… We are following all this closely”.
Are you looking for a simple and free digital menu solution to offer to your customers during the reopening? Go to digitalmenu.lu and let us guide you!
This article was first published in Silicon Luxembourg magazine
Author : Aurélie Boob