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When The Fortunate Cup Coffee Cafe Inc. began accepting a new form of mobile payments last week, it also began to brew up more business for the bank that made it possible.
Three weeks ago, The Fortunate Cup installed readers from Bling Nation Ltd. at its counter and drive-through window, allowing consumers to purchase food and drinks through a contactless payment sticker adhered to their phones. Doreen Kamen, the cafe's owner, says because Bling's system sidesteps the national payment networks in favor of a hyper-local approach, it gave her a more direct relationship with her bank than she felt she had with just her company's checking account.
"Now the bank sees me in a different angle as more of a merchant," she says. "They see the business I'm doing on more of a day-to-day basis between my deposits and my Bling account going through them. They get to know me, I'm a little more familiar to them should I need to contact them for anything down the road. It may be a small business loan or anything along those lines."
That bank is The Adirondack Trust Co. of Saratoga Springs, N.Y., which Bling, a Palo Alto, Calif., startup, plans to announce this week as its first deployment in the Eastern United States.
Whereas proponents typically pitch mobile and contactless payments as ways to shift consumer behavior away from cash, Adirondack sees it as a way to...