Three quarters of allO's revenue comes from financial services, such as payments, lending and insurance. Cancan Liu, co-founder of the Munich restaurant platform, says that is roughly the same split as Toast in the US. Toast is one of the biggest role models for embedded finance, especially in vertical SaaS. Even though the companies are so similar, allO never set out to copy it.
Cancan co-founded allO in January 2021 with a QR code on the table so guests could scan, order and pay. Everything since, the point of sale, the payments, the lending and now the insurance, arrived because a restaurant owner asked for it.
We go through how that happened, the cuisine go-to-market behind a thousand restaurants in Germany, and what it does to a software business when financial services become most of the money.
Key Takeaways:
- The four phases of allO, from a scan to order and pay tool to the digital employees the company is building now
- Why integrating with existing point-of-sale systems was a dead end in Germany, and what that forced allO to build
- How becoming the system of record meant restaurants started asking for the next product themselves
- The cuisine go-to-market, with dedicated Vietnamese, Indian, Chinese and German teams inside a company of fifty-five people from thirty countries
- How one night watching a restaurant owner reconcile card payments by hand turned allO into a payments company
- Why restaurants struggle to get financing from their Sparkasse, and what changed with finmid and later Stripe
- How embedded insurance with Kayna lets a restaurant pay for the two or three coverages it actually needs
- Why three-quarters of revenue from financial services is what makes an outbound field sales motion affordable in gastronomy