...would we ever ask people to stand still, swipe plastic, sign a receipt, and wait for a machine to beep?
No.
Guestmodinfo · 7h ago
The world needs some contract settlement company.
Where the payer i e. Customer deposits the money and also submits the details of work and quality of the work he needs from the contractor or the gig worker and then the gig worker completes the work and another company which we can call "quality assurance company" checks all the details if it is satisfied, it signals the contract settlement company to pay up the gig worker.
Also the "quality assurance company" ppl can also educate the customer i.e. the payer and the contractor or the gig worker about the expectations of each other so both are on the same page. I feel it's a billion dollar business
dragonwriter · 6h ago
You propose two niches:
(1) “Contract settlement company”: this exists, it is called escrow.
(2) ”Quality assurance company”: This also exists, though the names vary by domain. E.g., Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V).
They aren't usually linked the way you describe, and its not super common for them to be employed on the same transactions, because they are not-cheap solutions to problems which don't always occur together, at levels that justify those solutions, where any one of them occurs.
> I feel it's a billion dollar business
IV&V alone (which is a subset of what you call “quality assurance company” is probably significantly bigger than that (large project IV&V I've seen cited at typically 5-10% of total project cost, and the total cost of large enterprise IT projects is... a lot.)
And escrow (“contract settlement”) it probably closer to a $100 billion industry than $1 billion.
“A transfer of value between two parties, confirmed by identity, intent, and authorization.”
That’s it. Everything else — cards, terminals, signatures, pin codes, POS systems, receipts — are baggage.
If we had to invent payments today, with:
biometric presence
mobile wallets
crypto rails
ambient computing
BLE/NFC standards
AI agents
real-time FX routing
...would we ever ask people to stand still, swipe plastic, sign a receipt, and wait for a machine to beep?
No. Everything else — cards, terminals, signatures, pin codes, POS systems, receipts — are baggage.
If we had to invent payments today, with:
biometric presence
mobile wallets
crypto rails
ambient computing
BLE/NFC standards
AI agents
real-time FX routing
...would we ever ask people to stand still, swipe plastic, sign a receipt, and wait for a machine to beep?
No.
(1) “Contract settlement company”: this exists, it is called escrow.
(2) ”Quality assurance company”: This also exists, though the names vary by domain. E.g., Independent Verification and Validation (IV&V).
They aren't usually linked the way you describe, and its not super common for them to be employed on the same transactions, because they are not-cheap solutions to problems which don't always occur together, at levels that justify those solutions, where any one of them occurs.
> I feel it's a billion dollar business
IV&V alone (which is a subset of what you call “quality assurance company” is probably significantly bigger than that (large project IV&V I've seen cited at typically 5-10% of total project cost, and the total cost of large enterprise IT projects is... a lot.)
And escrow (“contract settlement”) it probably closer to a $100 billion industry than $1 billion.