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Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: SurgePays CEO Brian Cox (Part 4) - Sramana Mitra

Sramana Mitra: I imagine that because this consumer base doesn’t have credit cards, the entire e-commerce capability will be enabled by something like what you’re talking about. Amazon is one e-commerce vendor but Walmart probably wants to get to that segment and various other people who cater to that customer base. Even the food guys.

Brian Cox: The government has done a tremendous amount of studies on the health impact of low-income neighborhoods and their reliance on the corner Store. We use the word convenience store because, to us who can just hop on a car and go to Target, it’s a convenience.

It’s not convenience when it’s the owner’s store you go to. If it’s the store you go to five times a week, that’s your store. I say convenience to paint the picture for those who don’t live in low-income neighborhoods but this isn’t the big 15-gas-pump convenience store on the corner. This is the store that’s like the mini-mart that has everything.

I call in just-in-time. When you pay for something just in time, you always pay more. That’s the greatest irony in low-income neighborhoods. The folks with the lowest level of household income are paying the most for a half gallon of milk. They’re paying more for diapers. It’s a weird dichotomy. It doesn’t make sense at all. We are always challenging ourselves. The more buying power we give to folks, the more we enable these products.

Even going back to my first product – home telephone service – if you want a telephone service from Bell South and you didn’t have credit, you had to come up with a $250 deposit. If you wanted a job, what’s the thing that you put at the very bottom of your application? Your callback number. We want them to have jobs.

That has always been our driving force. How can we provide people a pathway to pay the exact same as a doctor and an attorney? These guys may have to pay upfront, but how can we give them the same pricing? That’s been the underlying driving force of everything we’ve built at SurgePays.

Sramana Mitra: I’m thinking of a lot of different things. One of them is how much do the Amazon’s or the delivery services deliver to these neighborhoods. Does the US Postal Service deliver?

Brian Cox: They do deliver. For a box that’s sitting in front of a welcome mat, it’s not going to be there all day or 24 hours later. In more techie towns, you’ll see Amazon lockers. It could be Amazon lockers delivered to the corner store. There have been talks of us installing lockers. The store owner would be paid a monthly fee from Amazon. You put those two together.

Now we have enabled the customer to put a value on their app. Now they have buying power. The store owner gives up a little bit of real estate and has enabled Amazon to deliver. It’s creating that natural flow of these folks having access to the same products that you and I would have by simply ordering with our credit cards.



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Thought Leaders in Financial Technology: SurgePays CEO Brian Cox (Part 4) - Sramana Mitra

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