Silicon Valley startup Kwedit believes online retailers are neglecting one-third of the U.S. population—the unbanked, underbanked or people who just prefer to pay with cash. This demographic shops online, but with no credit or debit cards cannot easily make purchases on e-commerce sites. Through Kwedit, consumers can select "Kwedit Slip" on the site’s payment page, print out the purchase information and take it to a bricks-and-mortar retailer to pay with cash. Once the payment is processed, the retailer’s POS software completes the sale and the e-merchant begins the shipping process. read more...

Kwedit, a pseudo-credit based monetization system that launched only 3 months ago, is seeing growth in its repayments. Their goal to enable honest people to purchase digital content online without the need of credit/debit cards is achieving fruition. One of their core features, called Kwedit Promise, allows users to buy virtual currency with a promise to pay it back later at a local 7-11 or by mailing in cash. With over 100 publishers on board, we expect that number to double in the near future. read more...

Kwedit is one of the more promising alternate payment methods for social gaming and other virtual good sellers online. If you don’t have a credit card and don’t want to get into the offers/scamville stuff, you don’t have a lot of options. Kwedit allows you to make a promise to pay later - by dropping by a 7-11 and paying cash, or just mailing cash in. If you don’t pay the money back there’s no enforcement against you other than being kicked out of the system. read more...

Every 20 years or so, the financial services industry experiences a wave of consumer innovation, such as when companies like E-Trade and Intuit changed the landscape by empowering consumers a couple of decades ago. Now there is reason to believe the next wave is about to hit. A host of changes and factors have created a "perfect storm" that I believe will lead to massive consumer innovation in the financial services sector over the next two years. read more...

If there’s one point that Kwedit founder Danny Shader would like to communicate above all else, it is that his one year-old company — which has already been excoriated by Stephen Colbert and favorably reviewed in the NYT – is a serious operation with two potentially lucrative ways to change how we pay for things. Shader’s message may be hard to stick. Kwedit, which went live on February 3, has received attention mostly for one aspect of its business: Kwedit Promises. read more... [$]

Any TV exposure should be a boon to a budding Internet startup. But Kwedit had the misfortune to have that exposure come on The Colbert Report. The site, a processor of online micropayments, got lambasted by Stephen Colbert in a four-minute segment over charges that the site's unique — and controversial — payment model makes it easy for kids to get credit online, no parental approval necessary. It's part of a persistent image problem the site has had since it launched in February. read more...