Neighbourhoods and corridors
Little Village & 26th Street · Pilsen · Humboldt Park · Belmont Cragin · Albany Park · Rogers Park · Devon Avenue · Back of the Yards · South Chicago & the East Side
Chicago's cash economy runs along a set of well-defined neighbourhood commercial strips — 26th Street, Devon Avenue, Milwaukee Avenue, Cermak — each with its own community, its own corridors and its own cluster of currency exchanges and check cashers.
$500.00
Counter order · Chicago
Chicago has a retail format most other cities do not: the licensed community currency exchange, a storefront that cashes checks, sells money orders, handles vehicle registrations and acts as a general financial counter for its block. It is close to a purpose-built home for this program.
Layered on top of that are the city's commercial strips, each serving a distinct community — Mexican along 26th Street and Cermak, Puerto Rican in Humboldt Park, South Asian on Devon, Polish along Milwaukee, West African and Caribbean on the far north and south sides.
On the ground
Licensed community currency exchanges, check cashers, money transfer agencies, neighbourhood grocers, phone and prepaid stores, convenience stores. These are the formats the program was designed around, and the neighbourhoods below are where they cluster.
Little Village & 26th Street · Pilsen · Humboldt Park · Belmont Cragin · Albany Park · Rogers Park · Devon Avenue · Back of the Yards · South Chicago & the East Side
Licensed community currency exchanges, check cashers, money transfer agencies, neighbourhood grocers, phone and prepaid stores, convenience stores.
Mexico, Puerto Rico, Poland, India, Pakistan, Guatemala, Nigeria — the corridors that drive stablecoin demand at a Chicago counter.
Spanish, English, Polish, Urdu, Arabic. Serving a customer in their own language is the single biggest advantage a counter has over an app.
The arithmetic
Crypto is priced as a percentage of the order, so the revenue scales with the ticket rather than with the number of items you sold. These are worked examples at an illustrative 1% to 3% revenue share — check your agent agreement for your own rate.
| At the counter | Order size | Store keeps (low) | Store keeps (high) |
|---|---|---|---|
| A customer cashes a check and puts part of it into Bitcoin | $200 | $2.00 | $6.00 |
| A regular buys USDT to send to family overseas | $500 | $5.00 | $15.00 |
| A customer sells crypto and takes the cash | $1,000 | $10.00 | $30.00 |
| A small business owner buys on payday, every other week | $2,500 | $25.00 | $75.00 |
| One larger order, the kind an ATM's daily cap refuses | $10,000 | $100.00 | $300.00 |
The figures above are worked examples, not projected or guaranteed earnings. They show how the arithmetic works on a given order size at an illustrative revenue-share range. Your actual rate is set in your agent agreement, and what any individual store earns depends on its foot traffic, its neighbourhood, its hours and how many customers it serves. Anytime Capital does not promise any level of income.
Typical time to serve a customer
Equipment to buy or lease
Assets your customers can buy
US-based support for your staff
Illinois community currency exchanges are licensed, examined businesses that already run a wide menu of financial services from a single window. That means the compliance culture, the identification habits and the recordkeeping discipline this activity expects are already in place.
It also means the customer expectation is right. People walk into a Chicago currency exchange expecting to be able to do a financial thing there, which is a materially easier starting point than a store where the customer has to be persuaded the service exists.
Onboarding an already-licensed exchange tends to be one of the shorter conversations the retail team has.
Your employee signs in at retail.anytime-capital.com, verifies the customer once, places the order and takes the payment at the counter. There is no machine to install, no crypto for the store to hold and no float to fund.
Anytime Capital is the registered money services business behind the transaction and carries the customer identification programme, the monitoring and the reporting. Your store is a serving location, and your existing licences remain yours with their own obligations.
Onboarding is a compliance review and a training session. Nothing is delivered to your address, and there is nothing to earn back before the first order is profitable.
Keep reading
The numbers, the rules and the store type closest to yours.
They are among the best-suited businesses in the country for the program, because they are already licensed, examined and running the kind of recordkeeping this activity expects. It usually shortens onboarding.
The ones with existing money services traffic — 26th Street, Cermak, Milwaukee, Devon — rather than general retail districts.
Not to act as a serving location for Anytime Capital's platform. Anytime Capital is the registered money services business and carries the compliance programme for the activity. State law varies, so what applies to your specific store is confirmed during onboarding, and nothing here is legal advice.
None. The platform runs in a browser on a phone, tablet or the PC already behind your counter. There is no kiosk, no floor space requirement and no monthly platform fee.
One to two minutes for a first-time customer, because their identity is verified once. Under a minute for everyone after that.
Elsewhere in the programme
The same programme, answered for a different question, store format or market.
Tell us where the store is and what your customers keep asking for. We will tell you what we can offer at your location.