Open banking solution gives customers a new payment option and significant cost savings
Leading UK food and catering supplier JJ Foodservice has partnered with Solaris and Ecospend to implement an open banking payment solution to enable its 100,000 customers to pay for orders direct from their business bank accounts instead of through card transactions.
The solution enhances JJ Foodservice’s customer journey, making payments and refunds instant while also giving the wholesaler a huge potential for cost savings by removing the cost of high business card transaction charges, which can be as much as 3%. Currently 44% of customers are already choosing to pay by this option.
JJ Foods is one of Britain’s fastest growing food wholesalers, reporting sales of £270m for the year ended March 31st, a 22.5% increase of the previous year. The Enfield headquartered firm has 11 depots around the UK and employees more than 750 people.
Mick Dudley, Chief Technology Officer at JJ Foodservice said: “By partnering with Solaris and Ecospend we are making our customer journey that bit smoother, by offering a payment method that can take payments and provide refunds in real-time.
“This will help to give customers a more real-time view of their costs with us, while also offering of another payment method. It also decreases our reliability on card transactions, which typically incur high transaction fees. Such cost savings play a key role in helping us to continue to grow the business and after one month we have already seen 44% customers opt to place orders via the open banking solution.”
The closed loop direct account-to-account ‘pay by bank’ solution will be offered to customers at the online checkout, which will signal the start of the open banking journey via Ecospend with payments crediting a JJ Foods account held with Solaris. Refunds and returned payments can also be initiated to debit the same account.
Andy Lyons, Managing Director of regulated Sales Europe at Solaris said: “JJ Foodservice is a true innovator in the sector and this solution offers customers a new way to pay, while enabling JJ Foodservice to make substantial savings on typically high business card charges.
“The successful roll-out of the solution is testament to our strong partnership with Ecospend and our capability to bring innovative payment solutions to a range of industry sectors.”
James Hickman, COO at Ecospend added: “This is a fantastic example of how partnerships can provide businesses with sector leading payment solutions, helping organisations that process a high volume of transactions to stand out in their market.”
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