Author: r b

The past couple of years have accelerated digital adoption at breakneck speed, and changed customer behaviour and expectations like never before.

McKinsey described the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on consumer behaviour as like covering “a decade in days”, with a rapid shift away from cash to contactless, from in-person to online, and from single-channel to seamless digital integration.

While not all the changes brought about by the pandemic are expected to stick, in some areas there’s no going back. In particular, customers have become accustomed to slick digital experiences, flexibility and personalisation as default, and as always, they’re comparing your brand against a benchmark made up of industry leaders. 

This shift in expectations is as true of loyalty programmes as any other area of your business. 70% of customers now say retailers should use technology to make their rewards programmes more effective. 

So how can brands upgrade their loyalty and rewards programmes to keep customers engaged?

Offer flexibility

Click and collect, fast free delivery, a full mobile experience – customers have never expected more from your brand. During the pandemic, many brands chose to offer more generous terms on loyalty points, extending their expiry dates or expanding their utility. 

While this was a short-term response to the pandemic, either to cover a period during which services were unavailable for air miles schemes, or to encourage alternative options like click and collect compared to redeeming points in-store, it’s likely to stick in customers’ minds. Points which expire too quickly or discounts with too many conditions attached could lose their shine, so consider ways to shake up your scheme and offer your customers more flexibility in how they redeem their rewards. 

Respect customer privacy

Third party data collected via cookies is on the out, with a steady stream of legislation making it harder for brands to gather insights without customers’ express consent. 

While many brands are struggling to imagine a future without their Analytics data, others see it as an opportunity to build stronger relationships with their best customers, choosing instead to focus on collecting “zero party data”, provided directly by customers. 

A loyalty or rewards programme can be an amazing way of building relationships with your customers, giving them a reason to share their data with you in the form of a reward or a clear benefit. Being fully transparent about how you use this data and how it benefits your customers is key – if you use previous purchase data to remind customers when they might be about to run out of a product, or ask for information about their interests and background to make sure you’re offering them discounts on things they could actually use, chances are they’ll be happy to participate. 

Move to tech-enabled schemes

While the benefits offered are a key factor in the success of your loyalty or reward programme, it’s also vital to make sure that customers are able to redeem their rewards in a way that works for them. Increasingly, consumers are turning towards digital payment methods over physical cards. 

Although a real-life card can still serve as a great reminder of your brand every time your customer opens their wallet), 54% of consumers expect to be able to make payments with digital wallets, so ensuring your incentive or reward cards which are compatible with Google or Apple Pay could make it easier for your customers to keep them to hand. 

Similarly, apps can be a valuable method of staying front-of-mind with your customers – 61% would download a retailer’s app to receive better loyalty rewards, and 57% would be more likely to shop if the loyalty programme linked automatically with their payment card. 

Focus on emotional engagement

The buzzword for customer experience during the pandemic was empathy – understanding that both customers and brands were going through a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and working together to get through the associated challenges. While the stakes today aren’t quite as high, empathy is likely to remain high on the agenda as customers struggle with a cost of living crisis and have to make hard decisions about their day-to-day spending. 

For brands, presenting a sympathetic ear to customers is the best way of building loyalty and weathering what’s likely to be yet another challenging period for retailers. 81% of consumers want a relationship with the brands they buy from, and loyalty programmes are a perfect way of establishing and strengthening that. By building a picture of your customers with first-party data and offering personalised content and rewards, your brand can connect with them on an individual level and help move their view of you from disposable to indispensable. 

Build personalised loyalty schemes with B4B Payments

Whatever your customers value, our prepaid cards can help you design a loyalty scheme that’ll keep them engaged with your brand.

Our fully-branded prepaid cards can be delivered physically or virtually, for a physical reminder of your brand they can carry in their wallets or an effortless addition to their Google or Apple Pay. 

Set your cards for use in your own stores, a range of partner stores, or leave them fully open to use in millions of locations worldwide. Offer instant loading of rewards so customers get their incentives immediately, and top up funds over and over again to keep them coming back for more. 

To find out more about how our payment cards can help you build the perfect customer loyalty scheme, contact us and book your demo today.

Gen Z is rapidly expanding their presence and influence in the workforce. The proportion of Gen Z – born between 1995 and 2012 – will increase to 27% by 2025, and like millennials, they’ll bring a different perspective to organisations across the globe.

While Gen Z are fundamentally still people, valuing much the same things as their older peers, they represent a continuation of an accelerating trend towards digitalisation, personalisation and flexibility. While all employees and consumers are expecting more, Gen Z have never known anything different, and this means that they’re less willing to make do with processes and approaches they see as outdated. 

Keeping up with Gen Z employees means embracing the best of what digital has to offer. Here are some ways to keep them engaged: 

Use digital as standard

While a lot of millennials are digital natives – they grew up using digital technology and don’t see it as anything new or exciting – Gen Z take this to a whole new level. While older millennials will remember a time before digital was widespread, and most will remember using clunky older systems or brick-shaped mobile phones, Gen Z has never known a time when technology wasn’t ever-present, fast and seamless. 

This means they have a whole new level of expectation when it comes to how your business uses technology, and very little patience for outdated computer systems or physical processes. While millennial employees can adapt, Gen Z are digital by default, and will think less of your company if you’re not able to meet their expectations. 

For firms who are bringing in Gen Z employees for the first time, this presents both a challenge and an opportunity. Your younger team members won’t tolerate inefficient or non-user-friendly processes – and really, why should they, or any of your other employees? While older employees might have been willing to make do, Gen Z could be the push your organisation needs to redesign its processes and move to modern, digital systems across the board, with wide-ranging benefits to your entire business. 

Offer flexible payment options

Raised in the era of fast delivery options, easy subscription services and on-demand access to everything from TV to taxis, Gen Z are hard-wired to prefer flexibility. This extends to their financial behaviour too – 42% of Gen Z members used a buy-now-pay-later payment option in 2021, with 20% of those preferring to use a BNPL option over their existing credit card. 

With a more flexible approach to their finances across the board, Gen Z value getting what they want as soon as possible. This even extends to their salaries – 61% of Gen Z survey respondents said that they’d like their employer to offer a daily wage payment option, giving them the ability to manage their finances in a more agile manner. 

Full disclosure – it’s likely that a big reason for this is that Gen Z are still relatively new to the workforce, with many working casual or gig economy jobs and struggling to build a base of financial stability (daily payments make it easier to pay down overdrafts and loans earlier, saving interest). There’s no guarantee this preference will remain when they’ve moved into more established careers. However, offering on-demand wage payment via a prepaid card could be a great way of incentivising casual workers, allowing them to see the fruits of their labours as quickly as possible.

Offer community and connection

Gen Z’s entrance to the workforce has been anything but routine. With a global pandemic interrupting their early years in work, many have found themselves working remotely or under strict social distancing protocols. While remote working is here to stay, many younger employees are feeling the lack of social interaction with their colleagues, and surveys are showing that increasing numbers of them would prefer at least some in-person interaction at work. 

Even if your company does work fully remotely, building a sense of community and connection at work is vital for all your employees, but likely to have the most profound impact amongst those who are new to the world of work. By giving your younger team members a chance to interact with and learn from more established employees, you’ll not only help to boost their experience and skillset more quickly, but to keep them engaged and focussed on their work. Whether that’s through regular virtual catch-ups, hybrid working models or even enforced in-person working days for some teams, helping Gen Z to establish themselves in their careers is likely to require a careful balance of the benefits of remote working and in-person collaboration. 

Deliver personalised rewards

It’s no secret that Gen Z are champions of diversity and inclusion, with the most inclusive and accepting views of any generation yet. While this obviously means your company will need to be on top of its diversity policies, there’s a more subtle point here – a generation who are more open and accepting of individual expression is likely to be far more diverse in their preferences when it comes to rewards and incentives – and more outspoken when their expectations aren’t met. 

While earlier generations might shrug off a poorly-chosen gift with “it’s the thought that counts”, Gen Z have far higher expectations when it comes to personalisation. Gen Z’s priority is manifesting their individuality, and they value employers who respect this. 

This means that when it comes to incentives or rewards, it’s far better to offer the ability to choose than to take a risk at guessing, or even worse, offering up a one-size-fits-most option. With flexibility high on the agenda for Gen Z, open choice options like prepaid cards give all employees the opportunity to choose a reward that’s right for them, without being limited to a store which might not suit them. 

Offer employee flexibility with B4B Payments

The watchword for Gen Z is flexibility, and with B4B Payments you can make your payment, incentive and rewards processes more flexible than ever, keeping all your employees more engaged and happy. From exciting reward schemes based off our flexible virtual or physical prepaid cards to advanced payment processes that make it possible to pay your team daily if they prefer, our end-to-end payment solutions can help you deliver more for your team members.

To find out more about how we can help you incentivise your team, contact us today. 

The scrap metal industry is worth £4bn in the UK alone, and continues to grow despite a challenging few years, including a drop in demand as a result of COVID and constraints on the price of scrap metal due to regulatory changes surrounding imports in China. 

High demand means that prices of metals are expected to continue to rise in spite of recent volatility, and a continued shift towards greener manufacturing methods such as EAF steel production is driving ongoing demand for recycled materials. 

While the future looks bright for the scrap metal recycling industry, high demand for metals like steel and aluminium is likely to drive increased competition amongst merchants, and wider market forces mean that while the overall trend is likely to be upwards, there could be some bumps along the way. 

To maximise profitability and performance of your scrap metal business, it’s important to make sure that your payment processes are as efficient and streamlined as possible – this not only reduces your manpower costs, but can help you to effectively manage compliance, keeping your business’s risk levels low.

Better still, an efficient, modern approach can help you deliver a better experience to your customers, encouraging loyalty and repeat business, and helping you stand out against the competition. 

So how can modernising your payments help drive the growth of your scrap metal business?

Make KYC compliance a breeze

With metal theft causing widespread issues from areas as diverse as trains to road signs, scrap metal dealers are subject to a range of legislation to ensure that they’re not inadvertently supporting metal theft. 

The 2013 Scrap Metal Dealers Act makes it illegal to buy scrap metal using cash, and requires dealers to verify the identity of all sellers by confirming photographic ID and proof of address. 

B4B Payments’ Bread4Scrap cards eliminate the need for scrap metal dealers to carry out these checks themselves – we handle it all when customers activate their Bread4Scrap card, and provide a full audit trail in our easy-to-use management platform. So, you can be fully confident that you’re meeting compliance requirements without the need to manually verify your customers’ documents. 

Instant payouts

Without the option to pay cash for scrap metal, dealers are often forced to resort to slower payment options like cheque or bank transfer. This can be frustrating for customers, who have to wait for cheques to clear, or anxiously watch for bank transfers hitting their account, days after their transaction has been completed. While it’s necessary to ensure compliance with Home Office legislation, these old-fashioned payment methods don’t deliver the best customer experience.

Prepaid cards like Bread4Scrap can transform the process. Instead of writing a cheque or sending a bank transfer, funds are loaded instantly onto a prepaid contactless MasterCard which your customers can use instantly. With the ability to spend in millions of physical or online locations worldwide or withdraw cash directly from an ATM, your customers get their funds instantly, with no waiting around. 

Alternatively, if customers don’t want to sign up for a card, you can use Bread4Scrap to make direct bank transfers, with lower transaction costs than your local bank. 

Encourage repeat custom

A huge benefit of a prepaid Bread4Scrap card is that they make repeat custom a breeze. Once a customer has activated their card and passed the Know Your Customer checks, cards can continue to be reloaded with more funds over and over again. 

This means that for existing customers, it’s likely to be far easier to return to your business than to go to a competitor, where they’ll need to go through the hassle of verifying their identity all over again. This encourages your customers to stay with you, in the knowledge that they’ll receive their funds instantly.

Better still – if a customer already has a Bread4Scrap card from another merchant, it’s easy to use the same card to add them to your system with minimal admin. 

Access easy reporting

A strong data strategy is vital to growing your business – understanding trends in performance and customer behaviour can give you the insights you need to spot new opportunities and take advantage of them, boosting your profitability. 

Bread4Scrap’s easy to use management platform gives you a comprehensive data reporting system, so you can easily track transaction data. It also integrates fully with FRED⁵ as well as a range of market leading accounting platforms, so you can automatically keep all your data in sync without the need to enter details multiple times.  

Transform your payment processes with Bread4Scrap from B4B Payments

Thousands of scrap metal recycling agents across the UK trust Bread4Scrap to make simple and secure cashless payments. With the ability to make fully compliant payments in minutes and no hidden fees, our system helps you stay in line with regulation and deliver an excellent customer experience. 

To find out more about how Bread4Scrap could work for you, get in touch today. 

The scrap metal recycling industry is hugely varied, made up of everything from small, family run firms to international corporations.

It’s also a heavily regulated industry, and regardless of the size of your firm, scrap metal dealers need to stay on top of a wide range of different legislation to maintain compliance, with stiff penalties if they’re found to have operated outside of the rules.

B4B Payments’ Bread4Scrap card helps scrap metal recycling companies stay compliant with regards to buying scrap metal, but there’s lots more to be aware of. Here are the main areas of legislation affecting scrap metal dealers in the UK:

The Scrap Metal Dealer’s Act 2013

In 2013, 2% of all police-recorded crime in England and Wales was related to metal theft. The Scrap Metal Dealers’ Act was brought into try and combat this trend. The main elements of the legislation (and similar rules brought in slightly later in Scotland) are as follows:

Licensing of scrap metal traders – The legislation requires that all scrap metal traders hold a license issued by their local authority. Those found trading without a licence face a fine of up to £5000. While the specific regulations in Scotland are slightly different, the main principles are the same. Scrap metal dealers must hold a Metal Dealer’s license issued by their local council, and must keep records of the scrap metal they handle or face a fine. 

Payments for scrap metal – The Scrap Metal Dealer’s Act 2013 also bans cash payments for scrap metal, requiring buyers to pay via cheque, bank transfer or another electronic funds transfer Legislation introduced in Scotland in 2016 also banned the payment of cash for scrap metal in the same way.  

Identity verification – In England, Wales and Scotland, scrap metal dealers must verify the identity of anybody they buy scrap from. This means seeing a valid photo ID like a passport or driver’s license, as well as separate proof of address in the form of a utility bill or bank statement. 

GDPR

While the Scrap Metal Dealer’s Act is the most obvious piece of legislation affecting scrap dealers, the requirement to verify the identity of sellers also increases their responsibilities under the GDPR, or General Data Protection Regulations, with risk of a fine of up to 4% of turnover if they’re not compliant. 

By requiring scrap metal traders to hold copies of their sellers’ identity documents, as well as potentially holding bank details for making bank transfer payments, the regulations place a lot of responsibility onto scrap metal businesses to keep their clients’ data safe and secure from theft or cyber-attack, as well as to ensure that information is only held for as long as necessary. 

While GDPR compliance can seem complicated, the basic principles of data security are fairly simple: ensure that any information on your sellers is held securely, either in a locked filing cabinet or in a secure digital format like a password-protected cloud drive, and ensure that only the people within your organisation who have a need to access this data are able to do so. You should also ensure you have a retention policy in place and periodically clean up old data – the Scrap Metal Dealer’s Act requires that records are kept for three years, after which documents should be securely destroyed or deleted. The Information Commissioner’s Office offers plenty of advice on how to ensure GDPR compliance and hold customer data securely.

Environmental regulations

As well as the legal aspects of physically buying scrap metal, traders have a range of responsibilities for how they handle and dispose of materials which could be hazardous to people or to the environment. 

You may need additional permits to handle scrap metal contaminated with hazardous materials, including radioactive materials, plastic, rubber or oil. Special waste such as battery casings, aerosols, fluorescent tubes or waste oil filters may also require that you meet additional compliance requirements when storing, transporting, treating and disposing of it. The End of Life Vehicle Regulations 2004 also require special handling of scrap vehicles to ensure that brake fluid, fuel, oil and other pollutants are removed and stored appropriately. 

Health and Safety

Last but not least, employers have a duty to their employees under Health and Safety regulations, and the realities of the scrap metal trade mean that there are numerous potential hazards that need to be managed to keep workers safe. Scrap metal dealers need to be aware of the potential risks in their business premises, from manual handling and working at height to fire or explosion risks and the potential hazards associated with operating specialist machinery.

Health and Safety breaches carry tough penalties in the UK, with the average health and safety fine in 2018/19 reaching £150,000, and over £54million in total fines issued. That’s not including the potential loss of productivity if employees get hurt, as well as the potential damage to your business’s reputation if things go badly wrong. 

 While Health and Safety gets a bad rap in the UK, compliance is largely based on common sense, and the stereotype of over-eager health and safety measures is mostly untrue. In fact, good Health and Safety management can help to make your business run more efficiently, ensuring that workers are trained in the safest, more effective ways of working and preventing lost productivity and delays due to sub-optimal working practices. 

Get a head start on compliance with Bread4Scrap by B4B Payments

With so many different compliance areas to juggle, scrap metal recycling businesses have a lot on their plates. Thankfully, Bread4Scrap from B4B Payments can take some of the pressure off. By paying scrap metal sellers on a flexible prepaid card, you can ensure you’re compliant with Home Office regulations banning cash payments and, because Bread4Scrap handles customer verification checks for you when a user first activates their card, there’s no need to process or store sensitive information like copies of identity documents, making your GDPR compliance smoother too. 

Thousands of scrap metal recycling agents across the UK trust Bread4Scrap to make simple and secure cashless payments. With the ability to make fully compliant payments in minutes and no hidden fees, our system helps you stay in line with regulation and deliver an excellent customer experience. 

To find out more about how Bread4Scrap could work for you, get in touch today. 

With fuel costs surging, it’s no surprise that fleet owners are taking steps to track and control their spend levels. Fuel cards are a big industry – it’s estimated to grow to over $2.5 trillion by 2030. 

While for larger fleets, specific fuel cards can be a useful way of managing mileage and maintenance scheduling, a specific system for fuel can be overkill for smaller businesses. Here are some reasons you might want to consider an all-in-one solution for your transport expense management, and opt for a prepaid card scheme instead of a fuel card:

More flexible 

Fuel cards do what they say on the tin – they’re used to purchase fuel. However, your drivers will incur a range of different expenses while they’re on the road, from food and subsistence to accommodation, tolls and even emergency repairs. 

The benefit of a B4B Payments prepaid expense card is that it can be used in millions of locations worldwide, on a huge range of different products and services. This means your team can carry a single payment card for all their company expenses. 

Some fuel cards are also linked to a specific chain of petrol stations, potentially forcing your team to go out of their way and rack up unnecessary mileage to find a participating station. A B4B prepaid card works just like an ordinary debit card, so it can be used in millions of locations worldwide.

Consolidated reporting

Managing expenses can be a time-consuming process for your finance team – collecting spend data from multiple systems is inefficient and can result in mistakes if information has to be manually copied from one place to another. 

With a single prepaid card to manage all your company expenses, your data will all be accessible from a single easy-to-use reporting platform. With easy categorisation of expenses and seamless integration into accounting platforms like Sage or Xero, your team will save countless hours on manual data entry which they can spend on analysing trends and spotting opportunities to make savings instead. 

Virtual cards

If your team member loses their fuel card, this can put them in a difficult situation. They (or you) will need to contact the card issuer to have it blocked, and will have to pay for their fuel themselves and claim back their expenses later. If your driver doesn’t have the available balance in their own accounts to do this, they’re stuck. 

With prepaid B4B cards, you have full control. Lost or stolen cards can be blocked instantly by your own team from within the management portal, or cardholders can do this themselves via the cardholder app. Replacing a B4B card is also much easier than replacing a fuel card – new card details can be sent out virtually and used over Apple or Google Pay on your team member’s phone, so there’s no need for them to cover the cost of fuel or other expenses themselves. 

Budget Control

A big difference between most fuel cards and B4B’s prepaid cards is that fuel cards operate on a credit basis – your usage is charged to you in arrears after its been spent. This can cause problems for your cashflow if expenses are higher than average one month. 

With prepaid cards, it’s only possible to spend the balance on the card, and there’s no credit facility, so it’s not possible to overspend. If your team needs additional funds you can load these instantly, but you’ll know about this in advance so there’ll be no nasty surprises at the end of the month. 

Lower fees

Depending on the volume of vehicles and mileage, prepaid cards can be better value than fuel cards. While at scale, fuel cards can help companies save by offering a discount on fuel costs, there are also a number of fees associated with holding a fuel card, from an annual charge per vehicle to a minimum usage level and surcharges for using them for things like motorway toll roads. 

B4B prepaid cards have no hidden fees and no minimum spend, so for smaller fleets or lower mileage requirements, you could find that the lower running costs offset the fuel discount you’d receive from a fuel card. 

Streamline your fleet expenses with B4B Payments

If you’re running a smaller fleet of vehicles or employing casual drivers, B4B Payments’ prepaid cards could help you take the stress out of managing your fleet expenses. With greater flexibility than a fuel card and no hidden fees, a prepaid card scheme could help you save time and money on fuel and driver expenses.

Find out more by visiting our dedicated page or alternatively completing our form HERE.

A survey by JP Morgan showed that 90% of respondents believed that payments are integral to the customer experience.

In the same survey, 52% or European executives said that the most important factor for payment experiences was that it was easy to use, quick, and frictionless.

There’s obvious logic there – if payments are easy and feel effortless, there’s less likelihood that customers will reconsider or give up on their purchases before completing their transaction, increasing conversion rates. 

It’s easy to talk about how payments should be frictionless, but what does that actually mean? We’ve set out the main priorities businesses should be focussed on to ensure that their payment processes feel effortless to customers, for the highest possible conversion and customer lifetime value. 

Start with user needs

While it’s hard not to get excited about the huge range of new payment technology hitting the market every year, it is important to take a step back and take a pragmatic look at what your customers actually need in terms of payment options. Often, simpler experiences are the smoothest ones, and trying to over-engineer your payment options to cover every eventuality might not have the effect on your customer experience you were hoping for. 

Think carefully about the journey your customers or clients go through when they work with you, and the experience of making or receiving payments from their perspective. Consider carrying out interviews, focus groups or user testing to figure out where the biggest sticking points are, and use this insight to improve your processes. 

Not only can understanding your users help you tailor simple things like the payment providers you offer, it could help spark ideas for more innovative offerings. For example, Swedish FinTech startup Juni created a system designed specifically to support ecommerce businesses after their own experiences juggling card payments across multiple online advertising platforms. 

Integrate for seamless experiences

Delivering seamless payment experiences for users can help to maximise conversion, reducing the risk of failures when customers are redirected to third party sites, and reducing the friction and visual jolt of being shifted somewhere else. 

Integrating payment features directly into your website, using an API to connect to a payment provider rather than pushing your users to their own website to complete payment, requires a greater level of tech investment than simply redirecting to a third party, but the resulting increase in conversion rate could more than pay for the up-front cost. 

Integrated payments don’t have to be online-only, either. Accelerated by COVID low-contact policies, businesses like restaurants are also seeing the benefit of innovative payment options, such as QR codes on bills which allow customers to individually pay their share on their phones via Google or Apple Pay, giving real-time notification to the restaurant that the bill has been settled and getting customers on their way faster without having to wait for a card machine to be brought to the table. 

Focus on accessibility

Accessibility is a key priority for designing seamless payment experiences. Good accessibility doesn’t just make your payments process easier for those with disabilities – it improves the experience for everybody. High-profile organisations like Gov.UK have invested in making their payment systems more accessible, while payment providers like Paypal have built a reputation for thought leadership around accessibility. 

From basic accessibility features like ensuring your payment system is easy to use with screen readers to accommodations for those with cognitive disabilities like dyslexia or dyscalculia, there are lots of factors to consider, and it could be worth getting specialist advice on ways to make your platform more accessible. However, at a base level, things like using image alt text, clearly describing any video or audio content, and ensuring that your payment screens are clearly laid out and display well on both desktop and mobile can help make your system more accessible for all your customers. 

Prioritise security and compliance

It’s worth emphasising that while consumers value seamless experiences, they’re no less focussed on data security, and the safety of their payment details remains a concern. 51% of respondents to a Paysafe survey in late 2020 said that they’d use any type of security measure if it meant their purchase was secure. 

With this in mind, it’s important not to compromise security in the name of innovation. While Open Banking and other embedded finance technologies are increasing the security of online payments, payment providers and retailers alike have a responsibility to keep customers safe. 

If you’re building a more innovative or advanced payment feature, chances are you’ll be taking on some form of compliance responsibility, and this can mean lengthy and costly license applications. Instead of going it alone, consider whether partnering with a BIN sponsor like B4B Payments could help you get your offering to market quicker. Working with a BIN sponsor means you can launch your offering leveraging your sponsor’s own licenses and authorisations, and that they’ll also shoulder much of the responsibility for ensuring security and regulatory compliance, from providing pre-built policies to supporting with fraud monitoring and detection. 

Deliver a seamless payment proposition with B4B Payments

Whether you’re building a custom embedded finance solution for your own customers, or creating a FinTech offering to serve a wider audience, B4B Payments is here to help, with expert support and 15 years’ experience in FinTech innovation. To find out about how our end-to-end payment solutions or our next-generation BIN Sponsorship 2.0 offering could help you revolutionise your payments, get in touch today. 

The COVID pandemic acted as a catalyst for a wide range of behavioural trends, accelerating adoption of a wide range of digital technologies from video calls to cashless payments.

Over a quarter of payments made in the UK in 2020 were made digitally, and this figure is set to increase even further. 

For consumers who’ve had a taste of more streamlined and flexible payment options, there’s no going back. Options like instant click-and-collect or QR-code based ordering in bars have shown customers a new level of innovation, and it’s unlikely that they’ll be willing to give these new, convenient options up again.  

For retailers and payment providers, this means that the pressure to keep up with rapidly-increasing customer demand has never been fiercer. With the cost of living crisis affecting consumer confidence and reducing spending, it’s never been more important to maximise conversion, and that means making payment as easy and seamless as possible. 

So how can you keep up to date with changing customer priorities, and ensure that you’re offering the most innovative payment options?

Offer a range of payment options with payment orchestration

With so many different payment options out there, offering a choice is the best way to ensure that your customers are able to pay using their preferred platform. While this can get complicated, a new wave of “payment orchestration” services make it easy for retailers to offer a range of payment options by combining multiple PSP’s into a single platform. 

While offering more choice is a benefit in itself, payment orchestrators take this to the next level by offering smart payment routing, directing customers to the lowest-fee options for merchants as well as automatically retrying declined transactions to minimise the risk of payment failure. While payment orchestration is a relatively new concept, it has the potential to streamline both customer experience and merchant processes to offer a win-win improvement in payment processing. 

Create seamless experiences with embedded finance

Whatever payment options you offer to your customers, it’s vital that their experience of shopping with you is fast and seamless. The days of being redirected from a checkout to a third-party payment processor are numbered, and consumers increasingly expect to be able to make payments directly within your interface, with no interruptions or jarring shifts to another website and back. 

Keeping up with customer expectations means investing in embedded finance functionality, integrating your payment services directly within your own platform via API’s (as far as possible, at least) rather than forwarding customers to another site to complete their purchase. 

Embrace instant payments with Open Banking

Instant payments have exploded in recent years. Largely driven by growth in the Asia Pacific region, the instant payment market reached $70bn in 2020, and is expected to grow to $200bn by 2024.

Open banking technology has made instant bank transfer payment a realistic option for a new wave of consumers, offering high levels of security, with no need to share their bank details. Real-time settlement also means that payments are deducted from customers’ accounts instantly, giving them a high level of visibility and control over their funds.

Instant payments also offer some clear benefits over card payments for retailers, with instant receipt of funds helping to boost cashflow and a reduction in the amount businesses spend on card processing fees. Instant payments can also reduce the risk of fraud or chargebacks, making them a tempting option for businesses.

Look to crypto for longer-term innovation

While it’s still very much a nascent industry, cryptocurrency payments are high on the agenda for financial institutions across the globe. With Visa and Mastercard offering support for Bitcoin in 2021, and a new raft of crypto-funded credit cards hitting the market in recent years, a growing number of companies are beginning to accept cryptocurrency payments.

While cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum fluctuate frequently, stablecoins like Tether and US Dollar Coin, which track against existing major currencies, are growing rapidly – according to McKinsey, stablecoin transactions worth $3 trillion took place in the first half of 2021 alone. 

Beyond simply working as a currency, crypto has the potential to revolutionise payments in the form of Decentralised Finance, or DeFi. DeFi technology has been touted as a major disruptor, with the potential to reduce international transaction fees to near-zero and make it possible to transfer funds rapidly across borders without the need for traditional banking rails. 

While it’s a way off yet, payments businesses are taking crypto seriously, and DeFi should be on the radar for any business who wants to be at the forefront of payment innovation. 

Stay at the cutting edge with B4B Payments

At B4B Payments we’re proud to have been at the forefront of FinTech innovation for over 15 years, and now as part of the Banking Circle group of companies we’re better placed than ever to help you make your FinTech dreams a reality. 

To find out more about how we can help you deliver innovative payment propositions, get in touch today. 

The world is currently suffering from an unprecedented shortage in commercial drivers.

There’s currently a lack of drivers in all regions except Eurasia, and the problem is set to grow further through 2023. While steps are being taken to encourage more people to train as HGV drivers, the problem is likely to continue for the foreseeable future, making it more important than ever to streamline transport and logistics operations and avoid wasting limited resource. 

Professional drivers have a lot on their plates, from managing paperwork and delivery notes to maintaining vehicle checklists and tachographs. Making their job as easy as possible means they’re able to focus on the vital aspects of getting the job done. 

Streamline expense management

For drivers managing higher-than-usual workloads as a result of staff shortages, it’s unsurprising that compromises might have to be made to get the job done – and collecting receipts to submit expense claims is unlikely to be top priority, no matter how important it is to your accounts team. 

By shifting expenses onto a B4B prepaid card system, you can make this job as easy as possible for your drivers. Having a specific card for company expenses will also make it easier for your drivers to separate their personal spending from business expenses, removing the need to fill in lengthy expense claim forms, and saving them from having to pay the costs up front and claim back later. Better still, with a cardholder app that allows them to photograph receipts and instantly upload them to you, you’ll save time chasing VAT receipts!

Put fuel and expense payments in one place

While many companies operating larger fleets use fuel cards, prepaid cards have some advantages which makes them worth considering as an alternative. Prepaid cards offer a single solution for both fuel and other expenses, like accommodation and subsistence, reducing the need for your drivers to juggle different systems and meaning you can view all your expense data in a single easy-to-use platform. 

Prepaid cards also work on a debit basis rather than a credit basis – so you’ll load each card with the necessary funds, and won’t risk unexpected surprises if spend runs higher than you’d anticipated. If your drivers need more funds, it’s easy to instantly top them up, or to set an automatic top-up level that they’ll return to each day. 

Make payments easy for delivery drivers

If you’re employing more casual delivery drivers, prepaid cards can be a great method of payment. Prepaid cards take the hassle out of managing payroll systems, with no need to collect bank details – your drivers can receive their wages in a convenient physical or virtual prepaid card they can then withdraw as cash or spend in millions of locations worldwide. 

Prepaid cards as a payment system for casual workers also means you can increase the frequency of payments if desired, for example paying your team daily rather than fortnightly or monthly. This can help keep your team engaged, and give them more control over their finances, increasing retention and engagement.

Deliver rewards and incentives

With a shortage of drivers, it’s important to keep your team as engaged and happy as possible to minimise staff turnover and maximise productivity and performance. Reward programs can be a great way of showing appreciation for your team’s hard work, as well as incentivising them for good performance. 

A driver incentive program based on prepaid cards can offer your fleet drivers rewards they can use on whatever they like, so there’s no risk of your reward not hitting the mark, or of risking offending people by giving a gift that doesn’t fit their personal or religious preferences. 

Prepaid cards are also reusable, so you can continue to reward your drivers for staying up to date with training, driving safely and achieving their KPI’s, or for minimising their mileage. 

Take control of your fleet expenses with B4B Payments

With fuel costs soaring, there’s never been a better time to take control of your expense and payment management. By implementing a comprehensive expense management system based on prepaid cards, you can keep control of your costs, easily manage receipts, and instantly track spend. 

Find out more by visiting our dedicated page or alternatively completing our form HERE. We believe we can help you save time and money on fleet expenses, so get in touch!

Cross-border trade is booming, and a growing number of businesses are looking outside their own borders as part of their post-pandemic recovery strategies. 

72% of SME’s have made a strategic decision to look for new opportunities in new markets, and 43% say they now do more business overseas as a result of the pandemic. 

While many are seeing success, cross-border payments remain a sticking point for many businesses. Nearly half of small businesses surveyed said that high fees and poor exchange rates were a problem. 

If you’re expanding your business internationally, the bank account you use could have a real impact on your bottom line. While traditional high street banks often charge a premium for cross-border payments, a new wave of digital banking services is making it easier and more cost-effective to do business globally. 

If you’re increasing the number of international payments you’re making, a specialist payment account with the ability to issue VIBAN accounts could bring a range of benefits and make doing business oversees easier, faster and cheaper. 

What is a VIBAN?

An IBAN, or International Bank Account Number, is a system of identifying bank accounts internationally to make cross-border payments easier and reduce the risk of errors. 

A virtual IBAN, or VIBAN, looks and acts exactly the same as an IBAN, with the exception that instead of representing a single physical account, a VIBAN is ‘mapped’ to another account with its own unique IBAN. This means you can create multiple VIBANs which all ‘map’ to the same central bank account, and that offers a ton of potential benefits to businesses. 

Easily grow your international presence

Building an international presence for your business can bring a host of challenges relating to payments. With traditional bank accounts, you’re usually only able to operate in a single currency, and international payments, while possible, often come with extra fees attached. This means that many businesses end up operating multiple accounts with multiple banks to cover the countries in which they operate. 

B4B’s VIBAN accounts are multi-currency, and can receive payments in 25 different currencies as standard. This means you can receive international payments and automatically convert them to your local currency before they hit your central bank account. This means no hassle juggling multiple accounts, and a smoother reconciliation process for international payments. 

Make faster international payments

High street banks often aren’t set up to manage high volumes of international payments, so if your business is expanding globally, you might need a more specialised option. 

B4B’s VIBAN payment accounts are specifically designed to handle high volumes of local or international payments. You can send outbound payments in over 25 currencies via banking rails using schemes like Faster Payments, SWIFT, CHAPS, SEPA or ACH in the USA. 

Because our accounts are designed to handle high volume, you’ll achieve faster settlement times than with many high street banks. 

Save on payment and FX fees

If you send or receive foreign currency payments into a normal bank account, you’ll often attract high fees for making payments via banking rails like CHAPS, as well as for currency conversion on payments received in foreign currencies. 

B4B’s VIBAN accounts can receive payments in 25 different currencies, with up-to-date exchange rates and no hidden fees. This means you’ll be able to convert funds received to a VIBAN into your local currency at as close to market rates as possible, adding up to huge savings over time. 

Make reconciliation easier

With a single bank account, it can be difficult to unpick exactly what area of the business different payments relate to, and you’ll be heavily reliant on the payment reference attached to a specific transaction. If your customer types their reference wrong, it can be time-consuming and difficult to track the payment down. 

With multiple VIBANs all feeding into a single account, you can give a client their own unique bank details with which to pay you, so there’s no need for a reference number. This means you can track the sources of payments much more effectively, easily segregate different types of payments for faster reconciliation. 

Keeping payments organised using VIBANs can also help to increase transparency around where different sources of funds have come from, reducing AML and KYC risk .

Issue international accounts to your customers

The ability to create multiple VIBAN accounts isn’t just useful for managing your business’s own payments. If you’re a payments business, you can also use VIBANs to issue bank accounts to your customers.  

Issuing your own VIBANs to clients is a fast, simple way of offering payment accounts as part of your service offering, with quick account setup and a great customer experience. Better still, VIBAN accounts will be in your client’s own name, not your business’s, so there’s no confusion for customers making payments to these accounts. 

Make international payments easy with B4B Payments

If you’re growing your business, B4B Payments could help you save money and time. To find out more about how you could streamline your high volume international and local payments using a B4B Payments account and VIBAN virtual account numbers, get in touch today.

For customers, faster is usually better, and streamlining processes to ensure that payouts are made promptly is an obvious way of improving your customer experience.

There are real benefits to businesses from speeding up disbursements too, from boosted reputation and lifetime customer value to reduced resource usage and a reduction in complaints and customer service requests. 

Real-time payments are a growing trend both in the B2B and B2C spaces. Open banking technology combined with Faster Payments is making it possible to pay out funds instantly to customers’ bank accounts, while prepaid cards offer a similar experience with added brand recognition and convenience benefits. 

Refunds

While it’s not ideal, customer returns are part of doing business, and the way your business handles these has a huge impact on your customer experience. Two thirds of shoppers say that refund times are an important factor in their decision on whether to return to a merchant. 

Being able to offer refunds instantly, either to a prepaid card or direct into a customer’s bank account, could have a real impact on customer retention and repeat purchase rates. Some companies, like Amazon, even offer to process refunds before the returned items have been processed – while this might seem risky, Amazon has clearly found that the improvement in customer experience and increased loyalty from honest customers is worth the extra hassle it might cause with a few bad eggs. 

Reward and incentive payments

Reward and incentive programmes are proven methods of increasing customer engagement, loyalty, and lifetime value. The most effective reward is one which happens as soon as possible after a customer completes the required tasks – instant gratification helps link the thrill of receiving a benefit or reward to the action they took to earn it (a purchase or recommendation, for example). This means that the behaviour is reinforced much better than with an incentive which takes some time to come through. 

While discounts or points can be a good incentive mechanism, they require long term action to build up, and this can reduce the “instant gratification” element somewhat. To get the maximum bang for your buck on incentive programmes, consider depositing cash straight onto a prepaid virtual card for users to spend right away – not only does this give them instant reinforcement of their decision to support your brand, but it means they’ll be able to use their reward straight away, rather than waiting for enough points to build up. 

Gaming payouts

In the gaming industry, fast payouts can significantly increase customer engagement and maximise the chances of repeat business – if a customer receives the funds from a big win straight away, they’re more likely to reinvest some or all of it into more gameplay, compared to receiving it several days later when some of the excitement has waned. 

Gaming companies can also increase customer loyalty and engagement by offering payouts on a branded pre-paid card. Not only does this allow funds to be deposited instantly, but it ensures that a customer’s winnings are separated from the rest of their finances, maximising the chances that they’re re-used for more gaming rather than absorbed into day-to-day expenses. 

International payments

If you do business internationally, you’ll be aware of how stressful cross-border payments can be. With longer settlement times and hefty fees compared to domestic bank transfers, sending money to foreign bank accounts can be a challenging process, and this can affect your reputation if the client or customer on the other end is getting impatient. 

With B4B Payments’ corporate payment accounts, you can send cross-border payments quickly and efficiently over banking rails, reducing settlement times and keeping your overseas customers or clients engaged. 

For customers who need refunds or other payments quickly, a virtual prepaid card could even reduce settlement times to zero. By transferring funds on a virtual prepaid MasterCard or Visa card, your customers receive their funds instantly via email, and can withdraw it from an ATM or spend it in millions of locations worldwide. 

Insurance payouts

If you’re in the insurance industry, the benefit of making an instant settlement goes deeper than simple customer experience. The faster an insurance claim is settled, the lower the likelihood that a customer will challenge the payout, and this can reduce the overall value of claims paid out, significantly increasing profit margins. 

Paying insurance claims quickly via instant bank transfer or onto a prepaid card can mean both happier customers and improved business performance. 

For travel insurance, virtual prepaid cards could make it easy to get funds to customers for fixed-price claim items such as delays or cancellations, or even to cover the cost of emergency alternative travel options or subsistence costs. This saves your customers the hassle of having to cover expenses up front and claim back later, and could be a major USP for your policies. 

Make faster, easier payments with B4B

Whoever you need to get funds to, B4B Payments can help you take advantage of cutting edge technology to make payments as near to instantly as possible. To find out more about how we can help, get in touch today.