What if your everyday payments could serve a cause you care about? That’s what the Franco-Swiss startup Retreeb is doing with its responsible payment application. Let’s take a look at this solution based on blockchain and offering a fairer alternative to the traditional payment system.
Daily payment becomes a good deed
Credit card payments have become a huge part of our daily lives. They represent about 1.5 billion dollars every day in France. On each of these payments, the payment terminal issuer (TPE) and the banks charge fees ranging from 1 to 2.5%.
Considering this range, this represents between $5.3 and $13.3 billion in fees each year. Imagine if this amount of money was not only for the benefit of the banking institutions, but for the service of the great societal issues of our time and community? This is the challenge that Retreeb, a Franco-Swiss startup founded by Jéméri Lepetit and which raised $1.7 million in February 2022, has set itself.
With Retreeb, everyday payments become responsible actions. Indeed, the alternative payment system developed by the startup proposes to redistribute one third of the fees (mentioned earlier in the article) to ecological, charitable or social projects. Then, another third is redistributed directly to the merchants
Infographic of how Retreeb works during a payment
It doesn’t cost the user a penny and allows to contribute to the development of the local economy or to a more equitable redistribution within the economy. Moreover, it is the consumer who has the hand on the projects that he wishes to “finance” through his daily payments. There are already a few of them:
- Unitlife, a UN initiative in which Retreeb is a partner;
- La Barque (Luggage shop in a solidarity café);
- Precious Plastic (recycling untreated plastic);
- Utopia 56 (transportation assistance for isolated minors);
- Récré en Herbe (De-concrete primary school playgrounds).
In fact, at the moment, Retreeb is being tested in the city of Tours, before being deployed in France and then throughout Europe. Thus, the majority of partner initiatives are currently located around the white and blue city
A simple application, to make blockchain accessible
From a user point of view, the operation is very simple. At the time of payment, the merchant generates a QR code directly in Retreeb’s mobile application to present to the customer. From a technical point of view, the system relies on a double infrastructure Off and On-Chain, more specifically on the Fantom network and soon on Polygon.
The network costs will be taken care of by Retreeb and the merchant will not have to worry about it. Indeed, the ambition is to make the use of the blockchain invisible, in order not to slow down the adoption to the general public, as Jérémi Lepetit explains :
The success of the democratization of blockchain technology relies on the ability of applications to make blockchain invisible to end users. Retreeb is a service intended for mass adoption and therefore limits any technical friction for its users. “
Note also that Retreeb has TREEB, a utility and governance token for the community. It can be staked and allows to benefit from free services on the application’s wallet (for example, obtaining a payment card), to obtain rewards and to participate in the section of projects that will be funded by users.
With our small everyday actions, we participate in building a better world. A few transaction fees on purchases, every day, may seem trivial. However, as the billions of dollars it represents at the end of the year testify, they are not to be neglected. Retreeb proposes to use them to make our payment system more responsible, ethical and virtuous.
