Sakae Holdings Ltd announced in Singapore yesterday that they will be partnering with MC Payment to jointly develop and launch an ICO for their own cryptocurrency known as Bitecoin. Sakae Holdings is known in Malaysia for their restaurant chain Sakae Sushi.
Sakae Holdings is among many of the traditional players that have jumped into the blockchain bandwagon. According to the press release sent to us, Sakae Holdings claims the objective of Bitecoin is to empower the industry to achieve greater efficiency for both consumers and merchants while at the same time optimising food retail systems and maximizing marketing impact for the latter. The digital token, Bitecoin, aims to provide reliable and secure peer-to-peer transactions between consumers and merchants through an automated process.
Douglas Foo, Chairman of Sakae Holdings said, “The F&B industry involves a complex value chain across suppliers, logistic providers and retail outlets. Due to the number of parties involved, information loss is a relevant issue to many merchants today. In addition, many merchants are using multiple digital-service systems that require separate equipment to cater to the various payment methods as well as their own membership or stored value cards.”
The key objective according to the parties involved is to have a transparent and secure system of records visible to all involved in the entire supply chain and to create a unified system to collect, sort and manage payment along with collecting data on user behaviours to fine tune their marketing game plan to personalise promotions to their consumer base.
The project will be jointly managed by Sakae Holdings’ newly established subsidiary Sakae Fintech and MC Payments’ Ffastpay. From what we’ve gathered the benefits described by both parties are the generic benefits of adopting blockchain technology, it remains unclear to us as to whether blockchain is necessarily the best fit for this problem statement or whether the end goal is here is to create marketing buzz. The Fintech News team maintains a healthy level of skepticism until more information on the project is made available.