Category: Company News

Jenny highlights her incredible experience as an intern at B4B Payments

About Jenny Sherpa

Jenny is an ambitious and engaging entrepreneur who is currently studying International Business at University of West London in her final year. She has experience working in the Financial Services, IT Services and Insurance industries, giving her a well-rounded background to innovate in the Entrepreneurial world. In 2018 she launched her own Textile start-up on top of that. But Jenny does not limit herself; she also indulges her passion for fashion, as well as taking a keen interest in Real Estate and the Fintech markets. With such an ambition and engaging spirit, there’s no telling what innovative ideas she will come up with next!

Account Management Department

In the first 4 months, Jenny had an opportunity to experience the London-based Account Management team up close and personal. Through face-to-face training, she was able to gain a comprehensive understanding of their roles and working styles. She took part in numerous activities that honed her resourcefulness, like looking after small client accounts, sending emails and calling clients, preparing presentations for meetings and organising trips all while attending various events too.

Upon the end of her 4 months, Jenny gained a wealth of new skills. She developed proficiency with Zoho CRM for emailing, creativity with Powerpoint for presentations, as well as obtaining knowledge from the Data Warehouse to produce reporting – enhancing her analytical acumen. Additionally, she strengthened her communication skills giving her great confidence going forward.

Marketing Department

Jenny engaged in a stimulating 3 months at the company’s Marketing department, gaining an invaluable learning experience. Under the guidance of the Marketing Manager, she learnt new skills that included crafting captions for social media campaigns, preparing email communications for clients, conducting market research as well as liaising with event organisers for Money 20/20.

At the end of her three months, she came away having gained an abundance of knowledge. She was able to further develop her marketing skills, learning new platforms such as Google Analytics, Hootsuite, Canva and Jaspa, and honing her already existing skills in terms of being more on the go, creatively engaging with language and researching for marketing purposes.

Sales Department

Jenny was eager to begin her journey in the Sales department, and the Chief Commercial Officer’s guidance on the first couple of weeks provided valuable insight. Jenny initially received 1-1 training from all the Business Development Managers and had the opportunity to observe prospect calls where she learnt more about negotiation techniques. She quickly familiarised herself with her role as a ‘Sales associate’, engaging in activities such as cold calling, emailing potential prospects, extracting data reports, and attending events. Jenny’s enthusiasm and dedication to these tasks proved to be beneficial for one of the Christmas campaigns she was involved in at the time – her efforts yielded a considerable number of leads that proved fundamental to the business.

After 3 months of hard work, she emerged a more engaging communicator. Her newfound confidence lent itself to tailoring her emails and calls to fit a more sales-driven approach. She even became adept at dealing with rejections in the course of cold calls and other situations where she received no response. In short, her communication skills were vastly improved due to her diligent training over the previous months!

The end of her internship at B4B Payments

Overall, her experience was a rewarding one in every sense of the word; she gained valuable knowledge from attending events and socialising with people from different vocations. By far the most engaging aspect was that everyone at B4B made her feel as though she were truly part of their family; appreciated for the work she put in and making a difference. It was evident that this internship allowed her to get an exclusive peek into what operations at financial services would be like, a great starting point to head into real-world roles!

We’re so pleased to announce that Jenny Lama has completed her internship with B4B Payments. Jenny came to us last year from her studies at The University of West London as our first ever intern. Over the last year, Jenny has spent time in Account Management, Marketing and Sales where she has been working with the various teams and learning all about the business from different aspects.

We’ll miss Jenny’s smiling face in the office but we know she’ll make a success of whatever she chooses to do in life. B4B will be looking for a new intern in September.

B4B Account Director and Jenny’s Sponsor, Tim Robson

Applications for the internship programme will start in July 2023! In the mean time, if you have any questions please email careers@b4bpayments.com.

With economies across the globe on the brink of recession, retaining important figureheads in business has never been more important.

Some minds would automatically flip to customer retention, and rightly so – customer churn rate can be as high as 30% in some global industries, and as cost of living increases, we can only expect this to rise. However, it’s not only customers that will help businesses sail through hard times. Retaining staff and partners is crucial to keeping businesses afloat, recession or not.

Creating reward and incentive programs for employees, partners, and customers alike could be the key to maintaining a healthy business in the near future. But with different needs, cultures and locations to take into consideration – a one-size fits all approach is hard to come by.

Are you incentivising the key players in your business? Read on to find out the different approaches to incentives, how they can help your business, and what B4B Payments can do to give you the master key for you

What are incentives?

Rewards and incentives come in all shapes and sizes. Whether you’re focused on B2B, B2C, or B2B2C, there’s always a way you can utilise incentives to create value, loyalty and retention for customers, partners and employees.

Customer loyalty rewards

84% of global customers are more inclined to shop with retailers if they offer a loyalty reward programme or scheme. Some of the popular types include: 

Point based reward systems

Offering customers points in return for their purchases or continued service is an effective incentive to encourage them to stay a loyal customer. Points are usually tradeable for certain prizes, products or cash sums through these types of loyalty schemes.

Tiered incentives

Cashback incentives can be offered to customers that hit a certain tier level with their purchasing. With tiers completely customisable by companies themselves, often taking the form of length of contract or amount spent, they are a great way to ensure that people are getting extra value for their custom.

Omnichannel incentives

Want to inspire customers to use different channels in your business? Offering cash rewards or discounts to customers who are purchasing or completing actions on different channels like mobile applications is the way to go. Not only can these incentives phase out the resource intensive channels like phone or email.

Staff retention incentives

Retaining trained employees has never been more important than it is today, and with 74% of employees saying that incentives and rewards were important to them, offering schemes like this can be an easy win to keep them onside:

Time-based incentives

Rewarding staff for their ongoing service, or keeping employees happy during the holidays is becoming more common in competitive industries. Through prepaid or cash offerings, your staff are motivated to stay with your business until the next milestone, and are more likely to be satisfied when they return from traditional periods of annual leave.

Target based rewards

Traditional bonus schemes are a great way to incentivise staff to go the extra mile while in service, whether it’s based on deals completed or targets met. Offering percentages of business deals, or flat rate recurring bonuses through prepaid cash cards will help retain staff, as well as attract new employees to the business.

Partner incentives

Partners are among the most important people in your business, and may hold the key to continued business. In fact 57% of companies use partnerships to acquire new customers. Popular ways to incentivise partners include:

Referrals

Rewards based on referrals are popular for partners and individuals alike. Schemes that involve cash incentives for business referrals can bring new business into your organisation, negating some of your existing sales and marketing process.

Research

Knowledge is power, and market research is the key. Rewards for partners who engage in market research is a great way to strengthen connections, as well as ensuring constant visibility on the state of B2B and B2C markets.

How incentives help

Incentives provide a constant reason for staff, employees and partners to continue to interact with your business.

However, in an international, diverse, and often remote-based society the trend for the instant gratification of cash is emerging moreso. In fact, 84% of remote employees surveyed named prepaid cards their preferred reward.

Not only is cash universally accepted for partners, employees and customers around the globe, it also eliminates the need to navigate cultural and political trends, as well as logistical issues that can stem from availability and delivery of alternative physical rewards.

The B4B Payments solution

B4B Payments allows businesses to execute their rewards and incentives scheme in one unified manner – thorough physical and virtual (closed and open loop) services.

Prepaid virtual and physical cards can be distributed as rewards on incentive schemes to partners, customers and employees alike to encourage referrals, repeat business and retention. Instead of receiving bespoke rewards or gift cards that can only be redeemed in certain stores, B4B Payments allows payments that are recognised internationally, and managed through an easy-to-use iOS or Android cardholder app, giving your recipients the oversight on their spending and remaining balance.

What’s more, B4B Payments allows you to brand your card services, extending the reach of your marketing efforts, as well as incentivising the key players in your business.

Discover more about B4B Payments engaging rewards and incentives

Looking to add prepaid virtual or physical cards into your incentive schemes? Take a look at how B4B Payments’ solution can help you maximise your goals through seamless reward payments.

To find out how our solutions can help you, contact us today!

By 2030, the global fintech market is projected to reach circa $700 billion representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 20.3%, it’s clear that businesses and individuals alike are continuing the trend of using technology for their payments.

With the competition in the sector fiercer than ever, and only expected to grow, speed-to-market has become a crucial factor when it comes to establishing new startups in a crowded market.

While direct scheme memberships through the likes of VISA and Mastercard can often be a laborious, time consuming process requiring significant investment, there is a quicker alternative to card issuing. BIN Sponsorship bridges the gap for fintechs wishing to offer payment solutions to their customers straight out of the gates.

Read on to find out how BIN Sponsorship can benefit your fintech business, and how B4B Payments BIN Sponsorship 2.0 could give you the tailored support needed to get your product to market quickly.

What is BIN Sponsorship?

For fintech start-ups, BIN Sponsorship is a solution that allows them to connect to the card scheme network through an e-money organisation, like B4B Payments. This allows them to perform the operations of a financial institution, before becoming principal members of card issuers like Visa and Mastercard. Drastically speeding up product launches, it is the perfect way to to bypass long and arduous direct scheme applications, and get products to market ahead of the competition. With an industry saturated with over 27,000 startups worldwide, gaining a speed-to-market advantage can prove significant.

Here’s a breakdown of BIN Sponsorship…

A Banking Identification Number (BIN) references the four or six initial numbers on the front of a payment card and helps to identify the issuer of the card during the transaction, giving fintech companies the ability to make payments quickly and efficiently between accounts.

Sponsors are third-party payment providers or e-money institutions, like B4B Payments, that connect fintech start-ups to approved BINs and account ranges. Sponsors effectively act as the middle-men to enable new businesses to offer payments solutions, allowing businesses to leverage their scheme memberships with issuers.

Looking for BIN sponsors to kick-start your fintech operations can be a tricky process. It’s important to consider a number of factors when partnering with a sponsor, including compliance, speed-to-market, and experience within the industry.

At B4B Payments, we have used our 15 years’ experience in the payments industry to evolve our BIN Sponsorship offer to the next level with BIN Sponsorship 2.0.

How does BIN Sponsorship 2.0 set you apart from the competition?

Using our extensive experience in payments, we have developed an end-to-end bridging solution for fintech startups. This best-in-market offering  provides support to businesses as they launch their service, connect with card issuers, and beyond.

We go the extra mile with BIN Sponsorship 2.0, extending our service to cover the most important areas of partners’ needs:

Functionality and compliance

Functionality and compliance are priorities for fintech businesses – often the deciding factor for whether new products and companies sink or swim. BIN Sponsorship 2.0 puts compliance at the heart of its offering, combining the responsibility to handle Anti-Money Laundering (AML) and Know Your Customer (KYC) checks, with funds safeguarding and fraud monitoring for all partnering companies.

More importantly, B4B Payments offers complete authorisation from the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), and the Bank of Lithuania with e-money licences, as well as Mastercard Principal Member status, which can be leveraged by startups wishing to expand internationally into European markets.

Tailored support

While BIN Sponsorship is sometimes used as a quick-win when gaining an e-money licence, B4B Payments offers an extended service outside of regulated EMIs, allowing businesses to continue to outsource scheme management, collateral requirements and settlements.

BIN Sponsorship 2.0 is not an off the shelf solution, it can be tailored to Fintech needs. It offers partners the chance to use our e-money permissions while building their own relationships with card issuers.

Partnerships to suit fintech needs

With BIN Sponsorship 2.0 there are a variety of partnerships to suit fintech businesses, whatever stage in the cycle you may be at.

For unregulated EMIs businesses, we offer a full end-to-end package. This allows total use of our scheme licences and e-money permissions, with the support of our experts as you choose your own suppliers and develop your own card programme using our framework. For fintechs who require a less hands-on approach, we also offer a BIN sponsorship light package, allowing direct integration into our platform, and enabling speed-to-market. 

For regulated EMIs without a scheme licence, we offer settlement, or turnkey settlement only packages, allowing you to leverage our issuing capabilities, while building your own UI.

What’s more, B4B Payments also offers a support service for regulated EMIs with scheme permissions, providing a continued service for safeguarding, accounts and payments.

Proven Speed-to-Market success

Our BIN Sponsorship 2.0 partners’ success speaks for itself. In 2021, Juni, an e-commerce fintech, partnered with B4B Payments.Through using our solution, they were quickly able to bring their card to market without first needing to navigate the process of gaining their own e-money licence and card scheme membership.

Juni continued to lean on B4B Payments as a partner for support throughout their rapid scale-up as they became one of 2021’s fastest-growing fintech startups, taking advantage of BIN Sponsorship 2.0’s product flexibility, as well as the experience of the experts behind the scenes.

Discover more about BIN Sponsorship 2.0 with B4B Payments

Do you want to know more about how BIN Sponsorship 2.0 can make a difference to your fintech startup? Discover our memberships and how B4B Payments’ experience in the industry can help keep you competitive.

To find out how our solutions can help you, contact us today!

If you’re looking to optimise your B2B payment services, or provide innovative Fintech payment opportunities to others, there are several key challenges with overhauling or expanding payment solutions that you’ll need to deal with.

These issues are particularly significant for those working toward optimising payment, payout, and card services.

The granular complexities of payment processes can sometimes be overlooked by businesses (particularly those in the start-up phase), who will instead focus on acquiring new customers and boosting brand awareness. However, without an effective payment process in place, organisations are more likely to experience abandoned carts and delayed payouts. Two-thirds of adults worldwide now make or receive a digital payment, and 80% of B2B payments are now digital. So, the time for streamlining your online payment process is now.

A common misconception by companies building out a payment solution is that speed to market can easily be gained by using multiple third-party providers. However, managing these specific payment capabilities can be extremely challenging and time-consuming, resulting in greater investment and loss of time to market. In this article, we examine the key challenges in managing payment processes and how to optimise them effectively.

The key challenges of payment optimisation

Legacy technology

Legacy technology can be problematic for your payment infrastructure. Disconnected tech stacks (i.e. legacy tools that do not integrate with new technology) can increase the amount of internal and customer touchpoints when making payouts and receiving payments.

Shockingly, over 90% of UK financial firms still rely on legacy tech. Businesses that rely on those firms for payment solutions will likely experience a high rate of abandoned carts as customers give up on lengthy payment processes. Legacy technology can also lead to a delay in receiving payments, which could cause operational and financial problems for any business.

Multiple payment services

Implementing multiple payment services, and forcing users to negotiate the different platforms, is a serious drain on your company’s resources. Among other issues, doing so can drastically affect speed to market and create supply chain disruptions. Instead, a company should look to connect services where possible, or offer all payment options under one platform.

Multiple third parties

As with using multiple digital solutions for your payment services, relying on multiple third parties can cause delays in payment and payout processing. These delays stem from the increased approval times, spread out permissions, and extra steps in authorisation users must take when navigating a payment system that uses multiple third parties.

For Fintech companies, the solution is to utilise a platform that allows you to manage your own payment processes and retain control. Having complete authority and a solid understanding of your payment infrastructure is the key to quicker payments and payouts.

Hidden fees

Another issue to consider when optimising your payment infrastructure is if your plans have greater internal build requirements than originally planned. Without careful budgeting beforehand, you might find yourself without sufficient resources to cover the increased costs.

Partner-specific challenges

There are various partner types that have their own unique challenges. For example, utilising a bank or niche service provider to support instant payment can lead to a loss of management control and added expenses in transaction fees.

Streamline your payment process with B4B payments

A 360° payment solution

B4B Payments can help you achieve your payment optimisation goals quicker through an effective all-in-one solution. We offer an easy-to-use platform that connects services together under one roof. This includes prepaid, instant virtual, and branded card creation as well as handling, payout and payment processing across multiple countries.

By leveraging a single source solution for card issuing and payment services, companies can avoid the heavy lifting of building out functions and quickly enhance the user experience without disrupting existing services. This also means a faster path to revenue, which is an easy target to miss when you’re trying to collaborate or build out the necessary operations.

Latest technology

Being held back by legacy systems? B4B uses robust APIs and cloud-based solutions that can be embedded in their native form, which saves companies from having to develop or manipulate new infrastructures.

Flexibility & security

Our system combines all our products into an all-inclusive platform for businesses to manage their payment processes. We offer everything you need to launch a card programme in a single turnkey solution, with advanced features, full flexibility and industry-leading security.

We have built for Fintech success and ensured that internal and external management is all in one place, so payers and payees have real-time views of all payment and card functions.

Take full control of your own payment processes

B4B Payments offers a tried and tested infrastructure that allows you to manage your own payment services and permissions, and remove the need for engaging third-parties through our sleek and easy-to-use platform.

Clients are provided with the full infrastructure and permissions to manage their own payments or Fintech within the UK and Europe. Our single unified service removes the need for overloaded tech stacks and reduces touch points from both business and customer standpoints.

Payment services from B4B

Optimise your payment processes with B4B Payments. We have over 15 years of experience in innovations in the payments space, and our unique card services can help you overcome any payment service challenges.Our focus is ensuring our clients are ahead of the game with fast and efficient transactions around the globe.

Discover more about B4B Payments and the services we provide on our website. If you’re interested in working with us, you can contact our team HERE.

Keeping track of corporate expenses can be difficult for companies of all sizes, particularly those operating globally.

Tracking receipts and managing timely repayments for an extended team spread across multiple locations is a complex task. Human error and convoluted reporting systems can create much confusion and cause problems with budget monitoring.

In some cases, the expenses process might have taken a back seat during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, as the world returns to a sense of post-pandemic normality, this means business-related travel, networking events and Christmas parties are back in full swing. As a result, it’s crucial to ensure that your expense management strategy is functional and serves your employees effectively.

Weak expense processes can cause dissatisfaction among employees, set your business back, and prevent your organisation from claiming back tax deductions. Read on to discover more about key challenges in corporate expenditure, and how to streamline your expenses process.

What is corporate expenditure?

Expense management determines how employees are reimbursed for business-related spending, including travel, food, supplies, and more. Typically, employees will need to fill out an expense claim form with details of their expenditure, and then the accounts team will process this information in the finance system and provide a reimbursement.

A good expense process should be quick, fraud-proof, easy to use, trackable, and provide timely repayments. There should also be a clear, enforced expense policy so that employees know what they can expense, how to expense it, and what their daily or monthly limit is.

Key expense management challenges

Complexities of numerous stakeholders, multiple locations, and manual processes can make streamlining expense management strategies a challenge. Here are a few of the main difficulties that businesses can often run into.

Manual error processes

The world is still swimming in spreadsheets and paper receipts. Over 43% of businesses still rely on manual expense processes. Manual processes make the capturing, recording and claiming of expenses awkward and prone to mistakes.

The probability of human error when manually entering data into spreadsheets is between 18% and 40%.The high error rate means there is likely to be misalignments between the receipts received and the amounts claimed, causing difficulties for the accounts team and inaccuracies when providing reimbursements.

Slow payment

Many employees cite an arduous reimbursement process as a key problem, with 40% of expense claimants experiencing cash flow issues because of slow repayments from their employer. During the current cost-of-living crisis (when many are already struggling with cash flow problems), difficulty in claiming expenses could cause serious discontentment among employees.

An estimated 38% of all employees pay for business expenses out of their own pocket at least once a month, which is likely due to a combination of payment delays and  a lack of clarity on the expenses system, or inefficiencies in the process itself.

Insufficient reporting visibility

An effective business should have complete awareness of what their employees are spending company money on and why. However, just like the ongoing use of manual processes, many businesses still rely on out-of-date tracking and monitoring systems. In fact,  26% of enterprise-sized companies have no awareness of how many expenses submitted are actually compliant with their corporate expenditure policy.

The lack of visibility means that companies aren’t able to keep track of employee spend, which could lead to expense fraud and exaggerated claims. It also means that businesses may struggle to understand how much they spend on corporate expenses. By streamlining their tracking and monitoring system, they could optimise their budget and save costs.

How to improve corporate expenses process

There are a number of ways businesses can work to improve their corporate expenditure processes. These include:

• Adopting a cloud-based expense management system to replace manual processes, reducing the the number of lost receipts and preventing delays
• Refreshing your policy to ensure it’s fair, compliant, and easy to understand
• Categorising expenses to make tracking and reporting expenses a lot easier
• Making use of mobile technology, so that receipts can be digitally uploaded instantly using an app

One way to quickly and efficiently optimise your corporate expenses program is through the use of a virtual prepaid card. Commercial card services are becoming increasingly beneficial in a cashless society, allowing customers and clients alike to make and receive payments instantly across the globe.

Card services also give companies of any size a flexible, all-in-one expense management solution that allows them to easily keep track of where money is being spent and on what. Not only do virtual cards make accounting and money management a lot easier, they also reduce the risk of theft and fraud while saving both time and money. Plus, businesses can easily access data which enables them to track spending habits and improve their financial strategy.

Enhance your expenses strategy with B4B Payments

B4B Payments provide virtual, or digital, prepaid cards which allow businesses to make a large number of online payments which are secure and within the expenses budget. Each transaction is tracked and receipt uploads are a breeze with the mobile app.

The self-managed, unified platform is quick and easy to install, and allows businesses to pay anyone overseas instantly. As a streamlined and one-stop solution, you can reload and deploy funds as you see fit to ensure that your employees are always covered for their travel and expenses. Meanwhile, the iOS and Android application lets employees track their expenditure and store photographic proof of purchase receipts at the click of a button.

Find out more about how B4B Payments could help you optimise your expense management process today, by booking a demo.