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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.

The past few years have been challenging for charities in many ways.

With increased cost of living driving increased demand for many charity organisations’ services, it’s also put donations under pressure as regular donors feel the pinch. At the same time, the COVID pandemic has dramatically reduced the number of cash transactions across the UK, reducing a vital revenue stream for many charities. 

With so much change, charities are looking to digital as a way of increasing donation levels to support their work post-pandemic. Many are introducing innovative new approaches to increase donations, helping them weather what’s likely to be a highly uncertain couple of years. 

While some charities are at the forefront of digital innovation, others are still catching up – the most recent Charity Digital Skills Report shows that 40% of charities still don’t have a digital strategy in place, and 17% don’t offer any online services. 

No matter what your charity’s level of digital maturity, there are simple steps you can take to leverage technology to improve donations. Here are a few areas to consider:

Contactless donation options

In 2017, debit card transactions overtook cash as the UK’s most popular payment method, and the pandemic has only accelerated this. It’s predicted that by 2027 only 16% of payments will be made with cash. 

With spare change donations worth as much as £320 million to charities annually, it’s vital that charitable organisations find alternatives to cash donations quickly. 

Contactless technology is a simple alternative to cash donations, allowing donors to give via a QR code or by tapping a card or smartphone. 

Direct bank payments

QR codes can even leverage Open Banking technologies, allowing people to donate direct from their bank accounts rather than using a debit or credit card. Where direct bank payments used to take time to confirm, many can now be authorised instantly with no need for charities to handle donors’ bank sort codes or account numbers. 

Direct bank payments also mean lower fees payable by the charity, so a greater percentage of donation revenue is retained. 

Micro-donations

While QR code and contactless donations mimic the convenience of a change collection box, they don’t replace the “every little helps” concept, where donors are giving loose change that means very little to them. 

Some technology providers are working to replicate this phenomenon – FundStar’s Percy prepaid card makes a micro-donation every time it’s used, allowing customers to give to your charity in tiny increments that they’ll barely even notice. 

Many online retailers also offer similar functionality at their checkouts – for example, Amazon Smile allows customers to set up a preferred charity and donate a percentage of their spend every time they shop. 

Automated gift aid

While encouraging donations is vital, it’s also important to ensure that your charity is maximising the value of every donation it receives. 

The UK government’s Gift Aid small donations scheme allows charities to claim back 25% tax on contactless card donations of £30 or less by activating PAR (Payment Account References), allowing Gift Aid claims for card payments to be automated. 

Streamline your payments with B4B

Whether it’s launching a prepaid card scheme for your donors or enabling direct Open Banking payments, B4B Payments can help you streamline your charity’s payment processes and get the most out of your funds. 

To find out more about how we can help, get in touch today.

One of the benefits of prepaid cards is that they don’t have to be a single-use item – they can be reloaded again and again.

While many incentives are one-off’s, there’s value to be had from using a prepaid card to build a longer-term relationship with your customers, driving an improved customer experience and building loyalty and engagement with your brand.

So how can reloadable pre-paid cards drive better customer experience and loyalty?

Guarantee Faster Payouts

For businesses who regularly pay out gaming winnings, commission or expenses, chasing payments can be an unnecessary hassle. And for customers who are waiting to receive payments from a business, waiting can be stressful and affect their opinion of a company, even if the payment delay isn’t their fault.

Whether your business is paying out insurance settlements, gaming winnings, referral commissions, or anything else, a pre-paid card can take the stress and uncertainty out of payouts. Because the payments are instant, there’s no waiting for bank transfers to clear, and customers can even receive an SMS notification when their payment has been made.

Drive Repeat Customers

For companies who pay out gaming winnings, commission or other regular loyalty payments, a reloadable pre-paid card can be an efficient way of not only getting customers their funds faster, but of maximising repeat business, too.

Funds loaded onto a prepaid card are automatically “ring-fenced” from a customer’s main bank account, and are therefore less likely to be used on general expenses.

If winnings or loyalty earnings are stored on a separate, branded card, there’s a much greater chance they’ll be used to play again or to purchase a “treat” that’s over and above that customer’s usual spending habits.

Build your Brand

As well as the function of a card, simply having a branded pre-paid card in a customer’s wallet can act as incentive and reminder enough. Having a branded card is a nice, easily recognisable reminder for the customer of your brand.

As well as that though, business today is becoming more and more values-driven – we see customers making decisions on where they spend their money based on ethics, and a pre-paid card is an opportunity to harness this.

For example, offering your customers eco-friendly cards will demonstrate commitments to the environment. You could even partner with charities and offer a donation for every £1 spent on the prepaid card, giving your customers choice in how their spending can have a social impact.

The knowledge that their spending is bringing a benefit to a cause that they identify with can create an all-round better experience for the customer and encourage them to keep coming back.

Keep customers engaged

While a one-off incentive campaign can drive brand awareness and engagement in the short term, some of the most successful customer loyalty campaigns run over the long term – Boots’ Advantage Card scheme and Tesco’s Clubcard have both been around since the 1990’s, meaning some customers will have grown up with the brand as a constant presence in their wallet.

Reloadable cards make it easy to offer similar long-term loyalty schemes – offering cash back for a certain level of spend is a tried-and-tested method of keeping your customers coming back for more. Reloadable prepaid cards can be set to closed-loop, meaning a customer’s earnings can only be spent in your stores.

And with no loading fees on prepaid cards, making small payments is cost-effective, meaning customers can get their loyalty credits or winnings in smaller, more regular increments, keeping engagement levels high.

Gather customer insights

One of the key reasons major brands like Tesco and Boots invest so much in their loyalty schemes is that, as well as driving repeat purchase, their cards provide crucial data and insights into their customers’ shopping behaviours.

B4B’s prepaid cards allow you to view transaction data and understand your customers’ purchase patterns, providing vital insights to feed into your customer experience strategy.

Reloadable prepaid cards can help you build a long-term relationship with your customers, not only by encouraging loyalty and repeat purchase but by providing insights into their behaviour to improve your overall customer experience.

To find out how we can help you with your own prepaid card loyalty scheme, get in touch with B4B Payments today.