Armenia has a good environment to start a world-class franchise, the co-founder of “The Green Bean” coffee shop, David Bequette, told Armenian News – NEWS.am at the sidelines of DigiTec Business forum in Yerevan.

The company participated at the forum inside the pavilion of ConverseBank, a local Armenian bank, and introduced a feature of the bank's payment app, which will enable the customers of Green Bean to pay their coffee bills directly from their bank account through a mobile device. 

«They reached to us and said, you are an innovative eco-friendly company that we want to work with, and we said, yes we’d love to», Bequette said.

Paying a bill via mobile requires no extra fee from the customer, he added – the bank charges it from the merchant. The difference of the app from its peers is that it can serve other merchants too – they only need to be registered within the bank’s app.

Presently the franchise operates only in Armenia but it plans to open a coffeehouse in Tbilisi at the end of the year. Another one will possibly be opened in one of the Central Asian countries.

“This will definitely be the first global Armenian franchise,” Bequette added.

Among the four founders of the company there are two sisters born in Yerevan, who later got married in the U.S. and helped their business partners to discover Armenia.

“We felt it was a great place to build a business, with a good entry-level business environment. It also seems there’s a real need here for something like a Green Bean. That is pretty much what attracted us to Armenia. Besides, you can start a business of that kind here for lower costs than in the U.S. or elsewhere in Europe,” he added.

The feature of the application for the coffeehouse clients was presented as a prototype, Bequette explained.  Probably a month later it will be launched on a regular basis.