In taking a different approach to payment of a restaurant tab at the end of a meal — as in, not going through the motions of a bill payment at all — Barclaycard says it is testing its "Dine & Dash" app at the high street chain Prezzo in the U.K.
Dine & Dash requires customers to check-in at an electronic box on their table, as the app will hold all payment credentials. The check-in process calls for the diner to tap the smartphone against a color-coded reader at their table.
When the meal is complete, the diners simply leave while payment is processed through the app, which has proximity tracking to sense when users have left and the table is open for waitstaff to prepare.
Diners can also indicate through the app if they are splitting the bill with other registered users, adding a tip or applying a discount code. All diners can see their bill total in real time and receive a digital receipt through Barclays' partnership with the
“Building on our experience in invisible payments, we wanted to use Dine & Dash to unlock a whole host of benefits for restaurant owners — from freeing staff up to focus on customer service to creating a better dining experience that increases loyalty to improving table turnover time," Nick Kerigan, managing director of future payments at Barclaycard, said in a Tuesday press release.
The premise of diners not spending a lot of time holding up staff and tables in waiting for the payment process to unfold is a way of "leading to higher revenues" for restaurants, Kerigan added.
The Dine & Dash testing comes at the same time Barclaycard said it released new research that found that 95% of restaurant owners prefer their staff to focus on delivering good service, rather than spending time on taking payment.
Dine & Dash builds on the technology Barclaycard began testing in-house in 2017 with the Grab + Go app that enabled the company's employees to use their mobile phones to scan and pay for goods in the Barclays’ staff restaurants.
