Our Story
Lucey helps businesses do business online.
The cloud let’s all business be BIG BUSINESS
Big businesses have been doing it for years. We all use internet banking to transfer
money, we pay our bills to utility companies online and as consumers buy our books
or music and so much more online. Just think about all those online services we
use every day from our desktops, laptops, mobile, iPad – whatever the device – and
we do it without a second thought.
Now think about your business. Is the service
the same as this? Your service might be more personal but is it as convenient for
the customer? There was a time when we complained about big business but in some
ways technology has made their service levels better. Do you offer your clients
a full online 24/7 experience combined with your personal service?
That’s what Lucey
do through our software and our partners. We create an environment where any size
business can work with their clients online. It’s that simple!
The Early Days
Originally we built a client log-in portal for service businesses to interact with
their customers online.
e.g. An accountancy practice in the past would post documents
(e.g. tax return) to the client to get them to sign it and send it back. Now they
upload the document, the client signs online and pay by credit card. The accountant
drastically cuts their costs and gets work done quicker while the client is much
happy with the service. The client ends up with a facility similar to online banking
where their documents are available 24/7 in a secure, convenient online space. The
customer leads our design team Listening is a great way to build a good product
so we try doing it a lot. Our portal started out as just file sharing but very quickly
we took on board customer ideas
- Documents needed to be signed fast. We created Digital Signatures that are simple
& compliant.
- Then the economy got tough and they wanted to get paid so we built in Online Payments.
- Integrated instant messaging, video calling, and chat - no problem.
- We build a range of mobile apps to deliver content to users in a usable way.
Payments taught us a lot
When we decided we needed to add payments to our portal we found that the payments
element was ridiculously expensive. Businesses where being charged 2-5% to process
credit cards. The industry model was that a business bought their payment processing
software from a software company and got their MID from an Acquiring Bank. The pricing
was confusing from both parties and the costs varied hugely so we decided to fix
it.
Lucey negotiated a joint merchant services rate across all of our customers
and we got great rates for SMEs. We believe they were the cheapest in Europe! However
despite being the lowest payment costs we found that businesses needed more than
that, they need payments integrated into their business process. For this we needed
to partner…..
And then there were partners
We decided that the best way to market our great payment rates were to integrate
them seamlessly into a business’s process. We began to offer our software white
labelled to software companies so that they could extend their own product offering
and it turns out everybody wins. The business gets cheaper credit card rates and
greater integration. The software company gets a new revenue stream, better control
over the processes within their software and they don’t need to spend millions building
a payments platform.
We now offer all our software, not just payments, to our partners to pick and choose
the bits that are relevant for them and their customers.
We are looking to invest
Partnering has worked so well for us we are now going even further and we are investing
in new or established businesses that are looking to bring products to market. Read
here for more about the Lucey Technology Fund.
We learn trying to be nice
In 2011 Lucey will donate more than €100,000 in development time to social causes.
Read more here.