WeWork, the NYC tech darling valued at $5 billion, has today officially announced a partnership with Chase to offer WeWork members discounted rates and premium customer service with Chase Commerce services (called Paymentech).
Members who set up commerce services for their businesses can bring in any three invoices from their current payments provider and WeWork, in conjunction with Chase, will beat it. The company won’t get any more specific about the size of the discount, largely because it’s determined based on various algorithms and factors.
Chase Paymentech currently powers payment platforms such as Square, and Apple Pay.
Alongside cheaper eCommerce payments processing, WeWork members will also get premium access to Chase Paymentech customer service representatives, with WeWork Adam Neumann saying that members can have a Chase employee on the phone within an hour as opposed to 48 hours.
JP Morgan Chase invested in WeWork’s Series C and Series D rounds, which is where the seeds of this partnership were planted.
Perhaps more interesting, this is just another in a long list of services that WeWork provides on top of co-working space.
For example, WeWork members can get up to $2,000/month (for 12 months) in discounts on Rackspace cloud hosting. Amazon Web Services is free to join and offers one year of AWS credits to WeWork members, which adds up to around $5,000 in savings. ZipCar, General Assembly, TriNet, AT&T, and WBMason also offer discounts to WeWork members.
This is possible for a few reasons.
The first is that WeWork is not negotiating on behalf of its ~300 corporate employees, but rather on behalf of 25,000 members.
“What’s exciting to corporate America is that any one of our WeWork members could represent the next Google or Facebook,” said CEO Adam Neumann. “And they want to be a part of that early on, not just to be a part of the growth of those startups, but to learn from companies that are more in tune with the millennial generation.”
According to Neumann, WeWork members can save up to $25,000 in their first year at WeWork on services alone.
Neumann said we should expect to see more WeWork member services roll out in the future.
