What open banking can bring to EPOS and payment gateways providers (and their users…)

Electronic Point of Sale (EPOS) and payment gateways have undergone huge change over the last few years, with the pandemic making cash-free transactions desirable — if not imperative — across a multitude of industries. The simultaneous expansion of payment solutions based on open banking has exploded the range of electronic payment options for consumers, and we are now seeing increased take-up of payment methods that rely on neither cash nor their default (but expensive) alternative, cards.

In this blog post, we’ll discuss the benefits of cardless payments for EPOS and payment gateway providers and their retailers and how Citizen’s PayBlox platform helps businesses solve their till challenges.

Why should I offer cardless payment methods?

Cards (whether physical or in e-wallets) are the dominant payment preference of consumers (Statista, 2021), but they come with critical, though often overlooked, issues. At Citizen we call them the 3 F’s of cards; Fraud, Friction, and Fees.

Friction at the till

Online retailers always make the user experience a priority on their website, but they often forget the checkout process. Sure, payments might not be in the top five priorities for a retailer when it comes to creating the customer experience, but the right point-of-sale solution will skyrocket your customer conversion. In one of our case studies, customers chose Citizen 30% more over Stripe and PayPal when faced with the choice of cardless payments at checkout. A frictionless payment option means that your customers go through the process of checkout much more quickly than they do when using debit or credit cards. No pins, no card codes, no expiration dates.

Fraud at the till

Online card payments data are often exposed to fraudulent activity when they are stored on a terminal. It can take a while for the customer to realise a data breach and it is usually the retailer that is left with the consequences. Citizen’s payments are based on open banking technology where there is no intermediary between the consumer/merchant accounts. Account-to-account payments’ security lies in the banks’ APIs, which are as secure as the bank itself.

Fees at the till

Another inconvenience of card payments is the high fees. Card fees can be as high as 5%, depending on the card issuer — a fee typically absorbed by the retailer (though sometimes shared with the shopper). To give a bit of perspective, if you take about £1M annually from sales through card payments, you and your customers can pay up to £50,000 just in card fees. Cardless account-to-account payments have the lowest fees in the market, less than 1%.

What are the benefits of cardless payments?

The customer’s experience

• Quick, easy payments
• A range of easy payment journeys adapted to their specific needs (online, offline, mobile etc)
• An intuitive and positive user experience
• No worries about their personal or card details getting hacked

The retailer’s experience

• Immediate delivery of funds from fully verified customers
• Easy refund and payout process back to those verified accounts
• An intuitive dashboard for tracking and reconciliation
• Easy integration into the retailer’s existing systems
• No worries about chargebacks, authorisation fees or interchange-international payment fees
• A payment method that has the lowest fees in the market.

The EPOS and payment gateway provider’s experience

• New market opportunities as start-ups, SMEs and enterprises all look to implement cardless technology at the point of sale
• Satisfied end-users, leading to satisfied merchant partners — leading to sustainable customer-supplier relations
• Flexible pricing tailored specifically to the customer’s needs.

Citizen’s PayBlox: an open banking payment solution

PayBlox is a modular, fintech platform that combines secure, instant cardless payments with a great customer experience. Easily and quickly integrated with your existing systems, the Citizen platform is connected to all major UK banks and offers super-competitive pricing that will make a material difference against your existing card fees. We have always championed the end-user experience, and provide merchants with fully tested UX-optimised journeys to ensure they have a payment experience worthy of their brand.

At Citizen we’re working with a number of EPOS providers and payment gateways, such as Tabology, an EPOS software house, to implement card-free transactions as part of their payment offering to their customers. You can add Citizen as a payment option at your till alongside your existing providers. We work with many brands, large and small, across the UK and Europe, and would love you to try it in your business.

For a full demo, or just to ask a question, please contact us here.