Open Office Q&A session

When is Nandos joining? When is Boots joining? Are you looking at working with more banks in the future? When is Barclays launching and what’s stopping that so far?

Unfortunately we’re quite restricted in what we can say about our other future partnerships due to confidentiality - we wish we could share more information about who we’re speaking to but our hands are somewhat tied! We can tell you that we’re speaking to as many banks as we can and that we’ve had a lot of really promising conversations with a number of nationwide retailers lately, so keep your eyes peeled for more on that in the future.

What’s the biggest challenge for you, getting banks on board or retailers? What’s the trickiest hurdle you have to jump over to get the merchants on board?

At the beginning our biggest challenge was definitely getting our first banks on board. Now that we’re live with Monzo and Starling (and soon to be live with Barclays), our biggest challenge is scaling - we want to get Flux into the hands of more customers, which means getting both banks AND high-volume retailers on board. From a retailer’s perspective, our biggest challenges are often operational - many retailers see the value in Flux, but allocating resources and having the integration prioritised can be a difficult undertaking, particularly in larger retailers where there’s a more complex organisational structure.

How long does it take to integrate with a merchant? Are you looking to integrate with non-bank services (like American Express)? Is it only merchants you work with, or could a POS provider like iZettle or Square open you up to many more? Have you thought of linking to Curve?

Flux is a software update to existing point of sale systems and requires no additional hardware. We can work with all integrated point of sale systems so there's no need for the retailer to make any drastic changes - in fact, our integration with EAT. took just 48 hours to complete! But the more complex a retailer is, the longer it may take - especially if a loyalty programme is being linked or developed.

We’re definitely interested in partnering with non-bank services - for Flux to work, we simply need to receive the transaction data to match to the retailer, so as long as that’s available in a format we can use, Flux will be able to successfully integrate. The way that Curve operates means that it’s not always simple to obtain transaction data, so we’ve not got current plans to integrate with them - though that may change in the future.

When will loyalty with KFC go live? Will Flux extend to KFC franchisees (such as motorway services)? How do you ensure that people don’t double claim loyalty by scanning their loyalty card and using Flux?

Welcome Break franchisees use a different POS system than the rest of KFC’s stores, which is why they don’t currently support Flux. We hope this will change soon. Loyalty testing from our end will be finished in the coming weeks, and we’ll then need to plan the launch from a business operations perspective with KFC. We’ve programmed the loyalty integration so that the API will throw an error if a loyalty card has been scanned at the till, so it’s not possible for someone to double-claim for any particular transaction.

I love the loyalty linking at KFC and I’m excited to see more merchants onboard! How are you planning on doing loyalty redemptions? How did KFC deal with the fact that the Flux loyalty linking may encourage people to use the KFC app less and get less screen time with their own customers? The loyalty with KFC is quite different to EAT. Which is better?

Flux is designed to encourage the collection of points and aims to make loyalty programmes available to more customers, but it’s the retailer who holds the redemption experience - this is because they should control the way that they communicate with their customers and how they interact with their loyalty programmes. The difference between the EAT. programme and the KFC loyalty is that with KFC, Flux is providing a link between an existing, external loyalty programme, whereas the EAT. loyalty programme is a digital stamp card that’s hosted by Flux. Both are great, but offer different benefits and levels of complexity.

Can you cope with tokenised card data such as GooglePay?

In short - yes! Both Google and Apple pay are currently supported by Flux.

Receipts are the evidence needed for refunds. How will you deal with customers who want to return one item on a multi-item receipt?

In order to be able to claim warranty on an item or return it to a store, you need to be able to provide proof of purchase. The retailer will then use the information to locate your purchase in their systems and validate your request. The key piece of information retailers need is the receipt ID, which is located at the bottom of your digital receipt. You'll notice that receipts from food and beverage retailers won't generally include this information, but you'll always have it for transactions where you've bought goods - such as transactions made at schuh.

Is there a limit on the number of line items you can process? For example, a retailer with 5000+ items. Do you plan on targeting the replacement of e-receipts as well and putting them in the banking app under your existing infrastructure for online transactions? Will KFC still automatically print receipts? Why is it not a VAT receipt?

There’s no limit on what we can work with, but the more complex the retailer, the more work is required to get receipts looking right. We’re definitely looking at moving into the online retail space and from a customer experience perspective it’d be good to reduce the number of emails following an online transaction.

Simply activating Flux won’t currently prevent a retailer from generating a paper receipt for your transaction, but it’s something we’d like to look at in the future. KFC doesn’t currently record VAT data as each item has a different VAT value, however it’s something that’s on their roadmap for the future, so once they make that change then your Flux receipts will be able to show this information.

Other than loyalty, what does Flux want to do next?

Our focus now is on scaling up and reaching as many people as possible. Receipts and loyalty are just the beginning - we think there’s a huge amount of possibility once we’ve unlocked the world’s receipt data. We’ve heard that business expensing and nutritional information are high up on many people’s wishlist, and while they’re not on the roadmap now it’s definitely something we’d like to explore in the future. If you’ve got any ideas, please send them our way - as our users, you’re best placed to know how we can make Flux work better for you!