Multistate medical operator Columbia Care Inc. has unveiled something that might excite a lot of people.
Columbia Care announced that it is launching a credit card for purchases at its multiple locations.
This is a huge score for the marijuana industry as the arena has been hit with many banking restrictions due to marijuana being illegal on a federal level.
The credit card is the first of its kind in the legal marijuana industry.
According to the company in the release announcing the credit card, Columbia Care “experienced an 18 percent increase in average basket size for in-store purchases using the CNC Card over other forms of payment, in addition to significant increases in repeat visits and an increased utilization rate for home delivery and automatic fulfillment.” Further, Columbia Care claimed that home delivery in New York has become its fastest growing segment of the CNC program and “currently represents over 10 percent of the Company’s revenue in the state, with an average basket size 40 percent greater than those in-store.”
“We are in the business of expanding the entire national cannabis market, and this is exactly the type of industry-wide challenge our team excels at solving,” said Nicholas Vita, CEO of Columbia Care.
“By launching the first credit card in the country that can be used by consumers and industry participants to purchase cannabis products, we now exclusively offer an important capability that will serve Columbia Care’s national growth initiatives, including home delivery, automatic fulfillment and e-commerce,” he added.
“If given the choice to pay with credit or cash, consumers prefer credit, and until now, the cannabis industry has been predominantly cash-based due to restrictions on the use of credit cards for cannabis purchases,” added Vita. “Through our exclusive network of partners and painstaking attention to detail, we successfully navigated the complexities of the financial industry unique to cannabis and are proud to once again lead the way as the first company to solve this fundamental issue.”
