Many businesses use file payments (otherwise known as bulk payments) to pay suppliers, contractors and even their payroll. Many Third Party Providers who, for example, provide accountancy software packages, can support business owners by using Open Banking Bulk Payments to initiate bulk payments directly within their accounting platform. This creates an amazing customer experience, streamlines the payment process for their customers, and creates a really sticky product. It’s not just accounting software providers who can benefit! This functionality can streamline a process hundreds of businesses make every day, and we’re really excited to launch our Bulk Payments functionality to our clients.

We’ve had many client requests for bulk payments, and we know it’s going to become a top priority for many businesses. There are significant differences in the requirements for bulk payments from bank-to-bank, e.g number of payments, max and min amounts, and required fields. We therefore knew it would be essential to normalise this detail as much as possible, and provide an intuitive service to our customers. To provide the best experience to our customers, Yapily has normalised these differences in the API, so that the request is validated and the appropriate response indicating the missing field or constraint is relayed to the user.

Previously third party apps could tell you who to pay, when to pay, or even send out invoices, but never before have they been able to offer actual payment initiation within their platform, via Open Banking. By working with Yapily, TPPs can now offer business owners complete control of the payments side of their business within their platform, totally differentiating their SME business product in the market. Our customers will also be able to control the customer journey end-to-end, without having to direct their customers away to carry out this payment. This will undoubtedly result in lower drop-off rates, increased app usage, and greater customer satisfaction.

There were 5.9 million private businesses in the UK at the start of 2019, and growing. SMEs, which are defined as businesses with fewer than 250 employees, accounted for 60% of all private sector jobs in the UK, a total of 16.6 million. There are huge applications here for paying that 16.6million workforce using open banking. We also know that SME business owners are crying out for greater clarity around both initiating and receiving payments, which via open banking PIS, can be made a lot more straightforward.

Read more in our recent Bulk Payments Update here.