Payz Combines the Best of PayPal, iTunes, Amazon FPS, Google Checkout, and Facebook
Credits for the Ultimate in Frictionless Commerce
NEW YORK—February 22, 2012—Ingk Labs has announced the acquisition of ORCA, a payments and related transactions platform for e-commerce initially funded by Metamorphic Ventures, KPG Ventures and prominent angels including Geoff Judge, Roger Ehrenberg, and John Frankel. Under the terms of the deal, Ingk Labs assumes control of intellectual property rights, engineering resources, and all other ORCA-related assets. Its underlying technology will now provide the foundation for Payz, a new streamlined service that blends a customer-management approach with end-to-end payments processing for credit card settlement, stored-value micro-transaction management, branded loyalty and rewards programs, and digital gift cards with integrated backend analytics.
Accepting payments online has become a complex, archaic process that is bogged down in legacy infrastructure with complicated merchant account set-up procedures, gateways, and subscriptions. Payz will cut through the clutter of a deeply fragmented industry 
burdened with intimidating regulations, hidden fees, and daunting compliance standards by offering a straightforward, lightweight API that lets developers take payments via the Web without the hassle of setting up merchant accounts and contracts, or the necessity of storing credit cards. It also securely manages customer data while complying with anti-fraud regulations.
Building on ORCA’s hassle-free model, Payz will provide many of the popular features of major “closed” commerce systems such as PayPal, iTunes, Amazon FPS, Google Checkout, and Facebook credits in a single, unified service. This means merchants can retain control of the entire payments experience by building their own payment procedures and branding the look and feel of transactions, and site owners can stay on their own site for checkout. In addition, retailers using the Payz system will be able to create a consolidated gift card center via social media, mobile, and other apps, and participating merchants can effortlessly load these values onto their Payz-compatible virtual currency.
“It’s no secret that services like PayPal and Google Checkout simply don’t deliver a great customer experience—and they’re a confusing mess for developers,” said Rich Caccappolo, the former CEO of ORCA who will now serve as a strategic advisor to the Payz development team at Ingk Labs. “We originally developed ORCA on the premise that integration should be simple, but the value proposition is really about managing relationships with your best customers and incenting them to become even better customers.”
ORCA runs on jPOS, the prevailing open-source standard for financial software applications used by JPMorgan Chase, Blackhawk, First Data and most other major financial services institutions, and provides a sophisticated dashboard that lets retailers track everything from customer payments to stored-value transfers, and manage real-time affinity programs for frequent shoppers. The customer data gleaned through the built-in analytics of the new Payz platform will make it easy for merchants to engender greater customer intimacy and annuity relationships, while increasing per transaction lift with frictionless checkout.
Caccappolo continued, “The team at Ingk Labs has all the right experience to transform what we started with ORCA into a PayPal-killer. That’s why we chose them—they understand that to create significant operational savings and efficiencies, Payz needs to be more than just another payment transaction system.”
The design of ORCA was the brainchild of Todd Davis, a 20-year veteran engineer of banking transactions systems, and Alejandro Revilla, the creator of jPOS which is considered the “Linux” of transaction processing. Both Davis and Revilla will serve in key roles at Ingk Labs in the development of Payz, and ORCA has already been fully assigned to a dedicated Ingk Labs fast-track startup team which has begun work on refining the technology and integrating it into existing and future portfolio ventures under the Payz umbrella including Barterpop, the firm’s recently revealed multilateral barter and trade service. Based on its current sales pipeline, the company forecasts more than $400 million in transactions over the Payz platform in the first year after build-out is complete.
According to Craig Alberino, CEO and founding partner at Ingk Labs, “Payz, seamlessly integrated with our complementary portfolio projects in commerce, data analytics, social media, and corporate giving, will provide an open programming workbench for a wide range of advanced online payments and branded merchant services. Given our undisputed pedigree as a trailblazer in Internet customer service, Payz is uniquely positioned to compete with the prevailing electronic payment platforms in a way that will bring substantial change to the industry.”
Payz strengthens the Ingk Labs portfolio with a set of unified, fit-for-the-purpose payment processing capabilities for both real-money and virtual currency commerce. The acquisition provides Ingk Labs with an array of additional technologies to supplement its existing portfolio, and is further evidence of the company’s achievement of strategic objectives to broaden its IP portfolio.
“Early payment platforms gained traction by exploiting consumer fears of online identity theft and payment fraud. Electronic payment processors like PayPal, Amazon FPS, and Google Checkout were successful by convincing consumers that their brand ensures data protection. However, that time has passed,” said Damion Hankejh, CTO and founding partner at Ingk Labs. “Consumer fear today is a myth, with both merchants and consumers shifting to different payment options. Payz allows consumers to securely shop and pay on a single site, while providing merchants with the greatest possible flexibility for growing revenue and increasing profits.”
An ever‐increasing percentage of consumers are shopping online, and merchants that support a successful online retail strategy stand to gain a growing share of overall retail revenue. Javelin Strategy & Research recently forecast that the total transaction volume for online retail will reach $445 billion by 2015. According to the Yankee Group’s 2011 Mobile Money Forecast, the value of mobile transactions worldwide will grow from $241 billion in 2011 to more than $1 trillion by 2015, a compound annual growth rate of 56 percent.
Coupled with its ability to power cashless commerce, premium customer care, and integrated charitable giving programs, Payz is poised to reap the churn of a ballooning market with a slate of consumer-facing ecommerce features and multichannel merchant services.
About Ingk Labs
Ingk Labs is a privately held IP Accelerator based in New York City. Founded on a fundamentally different approach to IP acquisition and development, the company is led by a cadre of industry luminaries and business experts who rescue hand-selected IP from the intellectual graveyard, taking it from concept to company and transforming it into fully functioning, capitalized portfolio ventures that demonstrate big potential for social media innovation. Ingk Labs invests in, builds, and deploys early-stage, disruptive technologies employing a unique IP acceleration model that allows for rapid innovation of technologies that share a common infrastructure with a distributed investment risk for investors. More information can be found at ingk.com.
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Ingk Labs and Payz are registered trademarks or trademarks of Ingk Labs, LLC, and/or its subsidiaries or affiliates in the United States and/or other countries. All other brand names, product names or trademarks are the property of their respective holders.
© 2012 Ingk Labs, LLC. All rights reserved.
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