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Working towards retirement is a common goal for many Americans. So what happens when the moment comes and you suddenly have the urge to work again?
For Armando Rand and Steve Marks, a few months of retirement was enough to convince them to get back to work — this time on their own startup.
Rand and Marks, along with cofounder Ronnie Silos, have created PayForward, a cashback system created to fund personal and charitable causes through rebates when making local purchases.
A user can walk into a local store or coffee shop, make a purchase with their card, and receive a micropayment to be allocated to any fund they choose, including health insurance premiums, charitable organizations, child savings accounts and more.
While the return on each purchase may seem menial, the service can reportedly produce between $500 to $3,000 in annual cash back for the average family and, for Rand and Marks, helping their community was the driving force behind coming out of retirement.
“The decision was very simple,” said Marks. “We wanted to give something back. And, in doing so, improve the local merchant’s ability to do business and increase sales.”
Before entering the FinTech world, the duo worked together at ACT Litigation Services, an early form evidentiary electronic document aggregator for the legal community, beginning in the 1990’s until Marks sold the company in 2011.
“Steve and I retired for a couple of months, but then began to talk about an idea that, quite honestly, we had far before the sale of ACT,” Rand said. “Around us, everyone was living paycheck to paycheck and even folks that did very well from a financial standpoint could never get ahead and no matter what, it was difficult to fund those things like their local church, their kid’s 529, or any other saving accounts.”
Founded in 2013, PayForward has remained hyperlocal, partnering with local restaurants, GAP, and The Banana Republic in Santa Clarita as they perfect their cashback system.
Since the micropayment is allocated to approximately eight different funds per transaction, the company is making sure the structure and system work flawlessly before expanding. But, Rand and Marks say they will soon be partnering with a large, unnamed health insurance company to help roll out their service on a national level by the end of 2016.
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