A year ago friends Bryan Keltner and Sankaet Pathak went to The Memphis Italian Festival where they discovered a major problem, they had to go outside the venue to pay for a ticket. Wanting to make payments with their phone, they worked together to create a new payment network that made transactions more secure.
That’s how synapsepay.com was created. Keltner and Pathak formed the app to help people pay for various things without giving out their personal information. Together, they wanted to form a direct relationship between the buyers and sellers that hadn’t been done before.
“This could help a lot of people out,” Keltner said. “Everything is getting hacked in the market these days.”
When you download the SynapsePay app, it leads you directly to your bank account. This helps to avoid having to deal with your bank’s routing number or account number. The goal of the company is to provide something safer than before and one where the user doesn’t have to worry about being hacked.
“This lowers fees for merchants,” Keltner said. “This saves them 50-80 percent monthly on processing fees. It also gives discounts to buyers. This app is made specifically with college students in mind.”
SynapsePay pairs together with local restaurants as an accepted form of payment. All someone has to do is go into a restaurant, order their meal and then pay their bill on their phone. After that, they share the confirmation to the server.
“We created this as a strong incentive for merchants lowering transactions,” Pathak said. “We are creating incentives between our buyers and sellers. We already have some good restaurants on board like Brother Juniper’s and Central BBQ.”
From Oct. 27-Nov. 3 SynapsePay is offering Halloween Cash Back Week where you get 10 percent cash back during every transaction during the Halloween week.
“SynapsePay works like a pre-paid debit card,” Pathak said. “You just load the amount and spend.”
Keltner and Pathak already have around 270 people using the app. They are working to get into a Hackathon competition at Microsoft this year. The competition is at Microsoft headquarters and is aimed at looking for a company that is just starting up. SynapsePay is waiting for a phone call from them any day now.
The two met through mutual friends around three years ago, and have been working on this company for the past year. They are trying to put the word out through the college of engineering, where Pathak studies computer engineering.
“You see an opportunity in the marketplace and you take it,” Pathak said.
