Jean-Louis Van Houwe is launching Up Luxembourg, a subsidiary of the Belgian meal-voucher player Monizze. His ambitions for Luxembourg are the same as in Belgium: to double the size of the market of meal voucher users to 200,000 (compared with 80,000 today, according to official figures) and take a 30% share.
The polytechnician, who has worked for PwC, IBM and Alcatel, has entrusted Alicia Brun, ex-Payconiq, with the task of developing the lunch voucher fintech that he created 12 years ago at the Lhoft. The timing is not random. It comes as finance minister, (DP), launches a new phase for this benefit in kind with its digitalisation and the possible increase of the ceiling to .
Six months to convince the market
Van Houwe, who is also the chairman of the board of Fintech Belgium, intends to take advantage of the next six months before the new regulations come into force to convince the market. He has given himself three to six months, in 2024, to achieve 100% acceptance in restaurants, catering chains and supermarkets to allow employees to easily benefit.
There are four major arguments in favour of .
- Where Edenred takes 2.5% commission plus the price of a Mastercard transaction and Sodexo takes 2.75% plus a Visa commission, Up Luxembourg will have an all-inclusive fixed commission of 2.15%, explains Van Houwe. These are small percentages that can make a difference in a sector where Ebitda is often barely 5%, with no way of really increasing volume.
- The second fundamental aspect is that, where restaurant owners complain about the length of time it takes to get “their” money back, the Belgian fintech promises generations of automatic transfers, enabling them to pay within 24 to 48 hours.
- While the others charge companies a percentage of the total amount, Up Luxembourg will charge a fixed fee. Whatever the trend in the overall bill, companies will know well in advance what offering this service will cost them. “Employers will only need to set up the system, and it will operate autonomously afterwards,” explains Van Houwe.
- Last but not least, the new entrant to the meal voucher market intends to take special care with customer service, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
“I really believe that with all this in place, anyone who has ever wondered whether meal vouchers would be useful in their context will be able to switch to them simply and transparently,” says the founder of Monizze.
In a country with 30,000 SMEs, this is a clever calculation. Now it’s up to its country manager for Luxembourg to go out and convince people. “We don’t just talk to the country’s biggest employers,” explains Brun. “But with everyone. With everyone who has an interest!”
This story was first published in French on . It has been translated and edited for Delano.