No currency? No problem !

When were your last cash purchases? Certainly, it is convenient to pay for everything by card, including the smallest ice cream cone, without being looked at funny.

But it gets a lot of people and organizations in trouble as well.

Especially to cafe employees, who have seen the amount of tips melt away like snow in the sun. Curiously, it is not possible everywhere to add a 15% tip to your bill. I had two examples of this last week, including one at a Tim Hortons. At the other counter, the disgruntled employee said she had been asking her employer for months to modify the terminal, to no avail.

We can also think of the impact on the homeless…

All the organizations that collect donations using these small boxes placed near the cash registers of businesses are not left out.

For them, the shock was brutal. The coin containers that finance their activities completely disappeared with the arrival of COVID-19 for health reasons.

ASISTA is an NPO that educates assistance dogs whose job is to take care of people with post-traumatic stress or autism spectrum disorder. The loose change left in the boxes weighed heavily on his annual budget. "From 30%, we fell to zero", tells me its founder John Agionicolaitis.

Let me take a moment to tell you about the lesser known dogs of ASISTA than those of Mira. Their role goes well beyond that of moral support. If a person has night terrors, for example, the dog will be trained to detect them and wake the person up as quickly as possible. The animal can also be trained to walk behind an anxious person who is hypervigilant, rather than at his side, so that he feels safe in the street.

The other interesting thing is that the dogs come from shelters or rescue operations. “We save dogs and humans! says John Agionicolaitis, noting that there are 102 ASISTA dogs in service at the moment. Each took two years to form, at a cost of $25,000 to $30,000 for the NPO. Beneficiaries get it for free.

The demand for these service dogs is high! The waiting list has grown by 9,200 names since the start of the pandemic. Given the significant drop in its income (elimination of boxes and fundraising events), ASISTA had to stop analyzing requests to focus on training.

tiptap's solution

But we see the end of the tunnel. The NPO looked for a way, using new technologies, to replace cash donations. He found it in Ontario.

The young company tiptap has created small wireless terminals to collect donations made with a credit or debit card, or a digital wallet. Its devices can be installed near checkouts, hung around a volunteer's neck or stuck to the buckets used in the street during the Media Guignolée. Thanks to solar energy, they can even be installed in the middle of a park, as was seen in the Royal Botanical Gardens in Burlington, Ontario!

These customizable devices are rented on a monthly basis to organizations which must also pay a fee of 1.5% per transaction, explained the director of marketing, Fanny Brodin, in an interview. The company claims that there is no competitor offering a solution similar to its own. Patent applications have been filed.

ASISTA will receive 130 in August, which will be installed in veterinary clinics, Chico pet stores and IGAs. By approaching a payment card, a donation of $3 will be automatically made. Any amount can be pre-set on the fully autonomous device, and transactions are processed in a highly secure manner, promises Moneris.

“A lot of NPOs need money and the terminal is part of the solution,” believes John Agionicolaitis, who plans to test the technology for a year.

Currently, 99% of tiptap customers are charities. “There are a lot of other sectors we want to expand into. We see several possibilities. Just think of all the times when we would have paid with money: transport, turnstile, church, ticket office…”, confides Fanny Brodin.

To date, over 100 organizations across Canada have used tiptap's services, including Children's Wish Canada, the Salvation Army and the Cancer Research Society.

It remains to be seen how successful these small terminals will be with the general public. As convenient as they are, they force a donation of a fixed amount, rather than throwing us away with bulky change.

But for all those times in the last year and a half that you haven't donated, you can use your card for a good cause once in a while (after depositing all that loose change in your piggy bank, maybe ?). This is all the more useful now that the needs are great in a host of sectors and that many NPOs are suffering from a crying lack of funds.

On your cards, get set, give.

Some data on payments in Canada

Source: Payments Canada