March 25, 2024
Seneca News
Research aims to bring pay-on-demand to restaurant employees
Seneca and fintech CPOS work on an app to improve pay flexibility
Seneca Applied Research and CPOS, a tech company specializing in payment systems, are working on a project to help restaurants offer employees pay-on-demand.
The CPOS product ShiftPay would enable restaurateurs to pay employees’ wages and tips on a daily basis, while also managing shift schedules and invoices.
On-demand pay enables employees to get the money they’ve earned when they want it rather than on a company schedule. It’s a trend that’s starting to catch on globally and has been touted as appealing to those in the gig economy.
“This project is to solve a real problem for restaurateurs,” John Sbrolla, CPOS Director, said, noting it’s become a challenge for them to pay out tips in cash daily because most people are paying their bills with cards.
In addition, he said there’s a shortage of workers in restaurants and offering pay-on-demand could help attract and retain employees.
Having identified that problem, Ottawa-based CPOS turned to Seneca’s Applied Research to try and solve it.
Miles McDonald, Professor, School of Information Technology, Administration & Security, and Samina Rahman, Batuhan Ipci and Hien Nguyen, research assistants from the school, worked on the initial project from May through September 2023. The team started from scratch with a coding program called Flutter that can develop systems to be used on Android and Apple devices.
“Part of the challenge was working with Flutter because it’s a relatively new software development kit for cross-platform applications and there aren’t many resources for it,” Mr. McDonald said.
The team overcame a number of hurdles to build a web app that employers and employees could use to manage schedules and pay, he said.
“It was an excellent commercial exercise,” Mr. McDonald said, noting CPOS’s ShiftPay is a timely project.
“What they’re trying to do is a very good idea – allowing employers to pay employees in a new, evolving digital payment environment.”
Kaveh Eshraghian, Professor, School of Computer Programming & Analysis, is overseeing the follow-up research project, which started in October and runs through May, with the same research assistants.
They are finessing the app so it can be used on mobile devices.
“The challenge for the team is to create a functional app that will be used in a real environment,” Mr. Eshraghian said, noting it needs to be high quality to connect with payment providers.
“We have to use a couple of algorithms to encrypt information,” he said. “This encryption is very important to make all payments secure and ensure there’s no leak in sensitive information.”
The plan is for the app to be easy to use on a phone, tablet or a retail terminal, to have a range of information and to enable employers to make payments through various methods such as bank deposits, credit and debit cards and even cryptocurrency.
Mr. Sbrolla said the app was recently tested on phones.
“It’s progressing very well,” he said, adding the company plans to test it in a couple of restaurants soon.