Bucket | serious coin
What do you do with your coins? We kept asking ourselves the same question. And then we started to wonder how many people ask themselves that question too?
Everyday, millions of cash transactions take place in practically every consumer-facing business and industry in America; and what is often an overlooked component of these daily purchases are the coins consumers receive as change, often left to accrue in jars at home for months at a time, if not lost altogether. According to the US Treasury, $37 Bn in coin currency is in circulation throughout the country; and 85% of Americans have in excess of $90 worth sitting idle in their homes. The Government Accountability Office estimates that at any given time there is $10 Bn in coin currency out of circulation.
Three fundamental problems with coin currency are (1) growing irrelevancy to consumers and the marketplace, (2) increasing commodity and energy costs to produce and distribute the currency and (3) a lack of modern mechanisms for recirculation and/or exchanging (converting) into paper or electronic currency. In the past decade, there has been little or no innovation in addressing these issues.
Bucket is a patent pending solution to affectively store and convert coin change from peoples’ daily cash transactions. Uniquely different from conventional methods of exchanging coins for tangible amounts of money, Bucket’s proprietary platform conveniently captures coins from cash purchases at the point of sale. Banks and coin recycling services like CoinStar still require people to squirrel away their coins in jars, often losing them altogether.
A Bucket transaction will be similar in structure to a credit card transaction, but for all intensive purposes, it works in reverse. For example, Jane buys a coffee from Starbucks for $3.03 and uses a $10 dollar bill. The cashier gives her back $6 dollars in cash and $0.97 is then directly credited to her Bucket Debit Visa. As a result, Starbucks doesn’t have to worry about providing coin change, and Jane doesn’t have to carry it (how very green). The merchant will forward the “saved change” from a cash transaction to Bucket electronically through their point of sale equipment, i.e. cash register and credit card reader/transmission device. The transmission will be routed through the merchant’s acquirer network to the Bucket Web Server™, where the transaction and settlement is processed. What is significant about Bucket is that it requires us to do no additional manufacturing or any major installation. Bucket operates as a software based platform that integrates with the existing credit/debit infrastructure, and communication standards.
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Intellectual Property: Patent 68/318,907
