Barclays in Flux for instant digital receipts
“Nobody wants to keep track of hundreds of bits of paper in the 21st century”
Barclays is trialling itemised digital receipts to its customers via a partnership with start-up Flux, a rewards and receipt platform.
The upcoming trial will take place with around 10,000 users of the Barclays Launchpad app, its platform for testing new features with “real customers to learn more about how best to meet their needs”.
Matty Cusden-Ross, co-founder and CEO of Flux, says: “Nobody wants to keep track of hundreds of bits of paper in the 21st century. We are determined to digitise the world’s receipts by linking to how customers pay anyways so we don’t change behaviour at checkout.”
Customers taking part in the trial will see their receipts in real time, including all purchases, with VAT, delivered to their Barclays app.
If successful, the bank says pilots will then be rolled out to its five million customers using its mobile app. Work is progressing on the trial and the pilot will be “live as soon as possible”. One way of saying there are no specifics.
Although Barclays will be Flux’s first “tier one bank partnership”, the start-up has already collaborated with other banks like Starling Bank.
In addition to delivering receipts to Barclays customers, this trial also sees Flux partnering with Barclaycard, which helps businesses to accept payments. Barclaycard will provide the ability for merchants, via integration through their point of sale (POS) devices, to issue digital receipts to “any customer” from a participating bank who is enrolled into the Flux service.
Currently this includes Starling Bank cardholders and Monzo Bank in pilot, who will have receipts sent straight to their mobile app. Barclaycard and Flux have now launched across all EAT stores and, should the pilot prove successful, may look to add more retailers next year.
Flux states that it has a UK patent pending algorithm (a very common trend at present) that works by linking purchases to bank cards via a software integration to the retailer’s point of sale. The technology gets rid of paper.
Flux was founded in 2016 by Tom Reay, Cusden-Ross, and Veronique Barbosa and launched in April 2017. They met when they were employees 1, 2 and 4 respectively at Revolut.
Flux was part of the 2017 Barclays Accelerator powered by Techstars. To date, Flux says it has raised $1.5 million from London-based VCs including PROfounders, Anthemis and Force over Mass.
