Restaurant payments startup Cover boasts discovery-centric redesign powered by Foursquare

Restaurant payment app Cover received a refresh redesign today that looks like a cross between Foursquare and Yelp’s mobile apps.

The new app has expanded restaurant information, a more visible “directions” button, and links to OpenTable to make reservations. Now powered by Foursquare, the app offers suggestions for places to dine. The updated home screen features a new restaurant across the top as well as suggestions for restaurants that are near you, restaurants that are new to Cover, and a list of Cover staff favorites. The app also lets users file away their favorite restaurants.

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CEO and founder Mark Egerman said the latest version of Cover also refines tab splitting. Instead of showing you a list of everyone dining in a restaurant who’s using Cover, the app will serve up a more personalized list of people you can dine with. “It no longer shows you who else is here unless you know them,” said Egerman. “Now we know who you dined with in the past, and we know your address book.”

Getting check-splitting right is of particular concern for Egerman, who thinks a good restaurant experience shouldn’t end just because of the bill. Earlier this year, Cover rolled out a service called Float that allows people to use Cover even when they haven’t downloaded the app.

The update comes as digital payment solutions are becoming increasingly popular. Restaurants are tooling around with developing their own individual apps that allow consumers to pay for meals and rack up rewards through technologies like LevelUp and Tillster. Other companies, like Cover, are working on solutions that allow consumers to use one payment app at multiple locations. The latter group includes restaurant technology heavyweights like reservation software OpenTable as well as smaller startups like Reserve, TabbedOut, and Dash.

Already, Cover has accrued a total of 350 restaurants, the majority of which are in New York. That number seems paltry when compared to OpenTable’s network of 32,000 restaurants. Though OpenTable is the standard for digital reservations, paying with the app hasn’t taken off. Less than a hundred OpenTable restaurants in New York City accept its payment method. That could have more to do with the market than with OpenTable itself; it’s still very much early days for mobile payments, as Cover’s Egerman acknowledges.

“I’ll be the first to admit that we hit the market early. We’ve grown, we’re happy with where we are, but we’re probably three years out before this is a regular thing that is a mass market product,” said Egerman.

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That’s why Cover has focused on building more features, like restaurant suggestions, into its app. As long as credit cards and cash still exist, payment startups will need to provide other sources of value for customers to keep them coming back.