[VLOG] Open Banking for Wholesalers brought to you by Fena's cofounder Gosia Furmanik
by Gosia Furmanik on September 07, 2023
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Transcriptions
00:05 Hello, hello, hello.
00:06 My name is Gosia and I am a cofounder of Fena,
00:10 an open banking powered platform that supports
00:14 B2B and B2C sellers.
00:18 Today I want to talk to wholesalers or businesses that
00:23 sell to other businesses or sell to other wholesalers.
00:28 The reason why I want to make this video is actually
00:32 recently I've been speaking to quite a few wholesalers and they
00:37 alerted me to this kind of a new development when it
00:40 comes to payments, especially here in the UK.
00:43 As you probably guys well aware, we had a few years
00:47 ago we have an event called Brexit and that introduced quite
00:51 a lot of changes to the financial markets and how a
00:56 lot of payment institution operates here in the UK.
01:00 And one of the areas that has been
01:03 affected by changes brought by Brexit is actually
01:06 card fees, especially corporate card fees.
01:11 So a few months ago, quite a few payment
01:14 providers actually increased fees on the corporate cards.
01:18 So previously corporate card fees were in line
01:22 with the debit card fees or similar.
01:25 Now they are kind of decoupled and they can set
01:28 up their own fees for those separate corporate card.
01:33 As you're probably aware, wholesalers,
01:36 they sell to other businesses.
01:37 Therefore a lot of those businesses
01:39 want to pay for their goods
01:41 delivered by wholesalers using corporate cards.
01:45 However, it has become quite expensive for
01:50 wholesalers to start accepting or to accept
01:53 card payments, especially corporate card payments.
01:56 A lot of wholesalers, they
01:58 operate on very thin margins.
02:00 I know I've been speaking to the other day, I've
02:03 been speaking to a wholesaler that actually operates within the
02:07 food and beverage sector and his wholesaling margins on some
02:12 of the products are less than 1%.
02:15 Therefore he cannot really afford to have
02:20 corporate card fees higher than 1% and
02:23 some of them are higher than 1%.
02:27 So that actually caused him to
02:29 start looking into alternative payment method
02:32 to introduce onto his ecommerce website.
02:35 So B2B ecommerce website,
02:37 but also payment for his invoices.
02:41 And that's how he came across open banking.
02:45 So how wholesalers can take advantage of open banking?
02:50 First and foremost if they sell online and quite
02:53 a lot of wholesalers these days have the online
02:57 store, they can add open banking payments to the
03:01 checkout as an additional payment method and encourage the
03:07 customers, retailers to use that open banking payments as
03:11 a main payment method to them.
03:13 That will allow them to maintain or protect those
03:18 margins and don't get basically losses on some of
03:23 the orders that with the margins less than 1%.
03:28 Another way of actually taking advantage of open banking
03:32 payments as a wholesaler is actually use pay by
03:36 link or payment links with the invoices.
03:41 So let's say there is an order of, I
03:43 don't know, 15K, so quite a significant chunky order.
03:47 And you have an invoice and you want to
03:51 make sure that the invoice is paid promptly.
03:53 You can add payment link that is powered by open
03:56 Banking and provider like ourselves, Fena to that invoice and
04:03 then send it over digitally to your customer.
04:07 And they just by clicking on that payment
04:12 link, they can start the transaction and that
04:16 transaction will have everything prefilled for them.
04:19 They'll know exactly what bank account they're paying
04:21 to, they know what's the reference number for
04:24 that payment, and they know the amount.
04:26 So that takes away a lot of that kind
04:28 of manual filling in finding the right banking details
04:33 and being worried that on this quite large transaction,
04:37 the banking details might be wrong.
04:39 That is completely taken away.
04:41 Plus, if you have quite a lot of payments,
04:45 having payment links used for your invoice payment allows
04:51 you to speed up the reconciliation of the invoices.
04:56 Because with our payments, we notify you
05:00 every time the payment is completed, you
05:01 get a notification and that notification can
05:04 be used for the reconciliation of payments.
05:10 A lot of wholesalers, except outside of having their warehouses,
05:14 they often have some sort of physical store where their
05:19 customers, the business customers, they can come in and pick
05:23 up their goods or they can even go and start
05:25 shopping around and find and fill the basket and complete
05:30 the purchase then and there.
05:33 And in that case, you need an
05:35 ability to accept payments in person.
05:39 You can actually totally do that with Open Banking.
05:43 So Fena, we've built an app for iOS and
05:47 Android where it's connected to your main Fena account
05:52 and allows you to accept payments using QR codes
05:57 or NFC cards as well and triggers those transactions.
06:02 And if a business has a business owner comes, picks up
06:06 their goods to take it to the cafe or some sort of grocery
06:12 store, they can just simply pick up that order.
06:15 You generate a QR code for them, they scan
06:17 that QR code, their online banking or banking app
06:21 will pop up and they approve that payment.
06:23 And you get instant notification on your Fena
06:27 app that that payment has been completed.
06:30 And now we can just release those goods to those guys.
06:32 So introduce this kind of seamless way of
06:35 accepting in store payments using Open banking.
06:40 So those are kind of the three payment methods
06:43 that you can use if you're a really large
06:47 business and you have a lot of wholesale orders.
06:49 You might also want to use our Data APIs
06:53 to monitor your transactions and see if the transactions
06:57 that you receive both from Open Banking but also
07:00 from manual bank transfer, are automatically reconciled.
07:04 And if you want to know more about it, I'm
07:06 going to talk about Data APIs in the next video.
07:10 Have a lovely day, guys.
07:13 If you have any questions, leave them in the comments.
07:15 Please do subscribe. Thumbs up.
07:18 And if you want to get in touch
07:20 with us, you know how to do it.
07:21 Just email support@fena.co and
07:24 We'll reply to you straight away. Thank you very much.