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New Israeli startup TravelersBox has developed an innovative service and technology which enables depositing coins and bills into TravelersBox stations at airports around the world. The money is deposited directly to gift cards or used to make charitable donations.
It’s simple. Just leave your spare change when leaving a country in one of their boxes which are being added to airports around the world and they will put the money into a PayPal account for you.
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It always happens. You get home from an international trip and find a whole bunch of small coins left in your pockets. The denominations are usually too small for any bank to handle and not worth your time exchanging anyway. So what do you do with it?
Well some airlines now actually collect for charity small change that passengers going home might not need anymore.
TravelersBox promises that customers get the best value for their leftover foreign currency coins and bills. Deposit the money that you have left over from your trip and choose from its product offering – purchase a gift card or donate to one of these great causes. “Don’t just keep filling up the unused money jar back home.” it says.
The company partners with such retailers as Old Navy, Toys R Us, H & M, Barnes & Noble, The Gap and Foot Locker.
TravelersBox was founded by Tomer Zussman, Idan Deshe and Dror Blumenthal at the end of 2012.
“We started to see whether it was possible to make bank transfers of small denominations, and put it into a bank account or a credit card. We met with a clearance company and with one of the major banks, and they all told us, ‘There’s no way. If a person deposits five dollars, the transfers will cost him five dollars. Stay away from it, ‘” Blumenthal told Globes.
“They all frightened us with the logistics of collecting money from such machines. We had a lot of problems with the business model, and it didn’t come together.”
“One of us bought a Beatles album through iTunes for $4. Then we started thinking how to take the small cash denominations in someone’s pocket left over from a trip and create value for it, ” Blumenthal related. “If you transfer $4-5 to your bank account, it doesn’t make much difference, but if you buy a disk with it, that’s something else. We realized that, online, small denominations have more value. That’s when we realized that we had something.”
Global Blue, the tax refund giant that operates in 43 countries, invested $500, 000 in the company earlier this month.
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