A Chat with Veronique Merriam Barbosa, CEO and Co-Founder at FinTech Company: Flux

In a nutshell – Flux is a receipt data infrastructure platform connecting customers to see what they buy via their payment cards, generating digital receipts and product level offers. Flux Offers allows customers to sign up to receive instant cashback from top UK retailers, powered by our unique data set. We work with banks including Barclays, Monzo and Starling Bank and card schemes like Visa via our partnership with Fidel. Flux also works with retailers like H&M, Just Eat and KFC.

To build out our receipts and offers platform we have to work closely with banks, retailers and customers – this means we have to provide value to all sides of our three-sided marketplace. For customers, it’s an easy sell – get instant cashback from top UK retailers based on products you love. For banks our value is also clear – digital receipts are proven to drive up customer engagement with banking apps. For retailers, we have two distinct value propositions. First, retailers can provide a slick and fully digital checkout experience, without printing a polluting paper receipt. Second, with Flux Offers, retailers can grow sales and customers profitably through margin control, powered by our receipt level data.

With banks (including Monzo, Starling and Barclays), and retailers such as KFC, H&M and Just Eat, we’re delivering real value to our customers – we hit 1 million customers and 11 million receipts this year. We produce over 700,000 digital receipts and acquire over 36,000 new customers each month. Now, with our offers platform available to millions of UK consumers, we are set to exponentially grow Flux and disrupt the card-linked offers industry – which feels more relevant than ever, owing to the cost of living squeeze our customers are experiencing right now.
 
 

 

How did the idea for Flux come about?

 
My co-founders and I were all early employees at Revolut. One day, we were out getting lunch and received an enormous paper receipt – just for a couple of items! That was the moment the idea for Flux started to form.

We thought that it was completely insane that you can currently pay in extremely modern ways, such as through your watch or contactless, but then the only record of that payment – one of the most crucial parts – is produced on a tiny piece of paper that often fades quickly or is lost.

We did some thinking into why this is, and we realised that it’s because there is no data infrastructure connecting the items we buy to our payment methods. So we went ahead and built that.

We took our idea to the Barclays Techstars accelerator programme in 2017 and the team there got extremely excited about our business plan and potential. In the process of that programme, we won our first client – EAT – who had over 120 stores in the UK and bought into our vision of Flux as a powerful customer engagement tool. From there, we won our first banking partnership with Monzo, and the rest is history.

The name comes from a concept in physics and the idea that the only constant in life is change. Flux is bringing significant change to its industry and our payment experience, and digitising something that has been analogue for far, far too long.
 

How did the company evolve during the pandemic?

 
The pandemic presented a challenge as the retailers side of our business faced some very obvious, new obstacles. We were primarily focused on offline retailers and that’s where product strategy had focused up until the pandemic.

We achieved all of our goals during the pandemic on the consumer and bank side of our business – including launching the Barclays integration completely remotely straight into their main mobile banking app – however the retailer side of the business was facing challenges.

We used this time to regroup and refine our strategic direction. First, we doubled-down on thinking through how to help our retailers drive sales – the number 1 priority after an extremely tough few years. We also explored how to build out product strategy so that we could solve key issues for both online and offline merchants moving forward.

As a result of this, in the Summer of 2021 we launched three key products: Flux Offers, a self-onboarding tool for retailers to streamline the process of joining Flux, and a retailer dashboard for monitoring marketing campaigns run via Flux Offers. The rest is history. We’ve seen a 350% quarterly increase from Q4 ‘21 to Q1 ‘22 in the number of integrated retailers, an 81% retention rate of retailers running campaigns with Flux and an average 12% monthly growth of direct consumers using the Flux Offers product.
 

What advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs?

 
When you find a problem that you’re passionate about – become relentless about solving it. Grit will get you where you want to go. That’s the one quality that we look for in the entire team at Flux, and it’s the most important quality in getting to where I am today.
 

What can we hope to see from Flux in the future?

 
The applications of receipt data are enormous. The more we’re able to grow our network of retail partners, the more we can expand our offering to everyone’s benefit. For example, as we continue to expand our retail partners, we will offer consumers an automated expenses process by connecting into other third parties and feeding them automated receipts with consumer’s permission.

We want our digital receipt data infrastructure to become the norm in the future – like contactless payments – and all signs point to us heading there. It’s really exciting to be at the forefront of this new infrastructure and to drive it forward.