Barclays has become the first of the high street incumbents to engage with Flux, a digital receipt startup that is gaining traction with the new wave of UK challenger banks.
A deal with Barclays could be a game-changer for Flux, which recently raised $1.5 million in seed funding and scored a partnership with Starling Bank as the first startup to join the app-based bank's banking-as-a-service marketplace. Flux is also running closed user trials with rival challenger Monzo.
The upcoming trial with Barclays will take place with the estimated 10,000 users of the Barclays Launchpad app, the bank’s platform for testing new features with real customers to learn more about how best to meet their needs.
Flux has also partnered with Barclaycard to explore enabling major retailers, such as EAT, to deliver digital receipts to their customers. The tests will see Barclaycard provide the ability for merchants, via integration through their point-of-sale devices, to issue digital receipts to any customer from a participating bank who is enrolled into the Flux service.
If the trial prove successful, Flux - a graduate of Barclays' 2017 startup accelerator programme - will be rolled out to the five million customers using the Barclays Mobile Banking App.
Matty Cusden-Ross, co-founder and CEO of Flux, says: “We believe that Flux is the next biggest innovation for retail payments since contactless. 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 behavior at checkout.”