Flux: thank you and goodbye

UK Financial Chat Fintech Chat
754

I agree that it still seems early days, but I think the back end integrations are the difficult part, and I can imagine there’s a mountain to climb (both technically and business deals) to get the system functioning, with little to show from a consumer perspective. Fried chicken receipts might not be of interest to you (and they’re certainly not to me!), but it will help them get real world experience to get things working as smoothly as possible.

Email receipts as an option would be good, but I imagine this is the kind of thing that is relatively easy to add once the hard work on the backend systems and integrations has been done. At this point, I’m willing to give Flux some slack as the pace of change for POS systems can be painfully slow (as in, take years), so I’m not surprised it’s taking longer than we’d like to have digital receipts widely available.

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756

I wouldn’t get your hopes up, unfortunately. Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and Waitrose have had this for months now. I think it’s just recognition that most people don’t care about receipts and leave them anyway.

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757

Co-op (et al) would surely auto-email receipts to holders of their loyalty card before they give away any of that precious data to a third party.

758

That costs money, sometimes its better to partner with someone who has a track record of doing this rather than building it yourself with no experience.

Also one major point to raise… can you give me an example of a brick and mortar store that does this because i dont think i know a single one?

Every time ive got an email receipt ive had to tell the person at the till each time my email address and hope theyve listened to me that there is no p in thompson when typing it in :joy:

The beauty with flux is it happens in the background and doesnt slow down the transaction whatsoever.

Is it perfect? No. Is it 100% life changing? Not quite yet but it has potential so give them time to grow and see where it goes because not alot of other companies are trying.

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759

I thought they’d stopped providing digital receipts for KFC? I believe it was around the time they were going to allow you to automatically earn Colonel Club points without scanning your card.

I’m sure someone pulled out a topic that said it was just a trial which came as a surprise for most? :thinking: :man_shrugging:

Edit: Found the post - such a shame. Part of me was hoping that I’d dreamt it as I love KFC :pensive:

760

How the testing go?

761

Didnt wind up the receipts. Believe they winded up the loyalty linking test in order for a wider rollout.

I think then kfc updated their software on their end (very slowly) that caused reliability issues and it got postponed until it became reliable again.

@samantha.flux could maybe give an update on all that :man_shrugging:

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762

Phew! Yeah it would be good to get an update. Obviously it can’t be used now but when KFC reopens I’ll be needing to get my fix :laughing:

763

Morning all :wave: Nathan is right, it was only the loyalty linking that we wrapped up with KFC - we’re still offering receipts there (when they re-open properly!).

Basically, the loyalty linking we built for KFC was a custom integration because we wanted to see how it worked and whether there was an appetite for the product. The next step is for us to develop the product into something that’s able to be used universally, and also to work out the business side of the product and work out how/if this fits into our current suite of products.

All of the feedback we collected during the beta - and the helpful comments from the discussion here - have been logged and will be used by our product managers to help us shape the future of the product, so thanks again for your open discussions! :pray:

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764

Our merchants do send us all of their transaction information.

If you shop at any of our merchants, it’s possible we’ve been sent some of your transactions in the past,

Mind blown. :open_mouth:

We don’t receive any transaction information for Monzo customers who haven’t signed up to Flux, or for those who have chosen to switch off the Flux integration.

Please confirm if this behaviour is the same for all the banks and companies. I can not find this anywhere in your documentation.
__

Thank you for responding.

Wow, your confirmation is very worrying for me. I hoped my suspicion was wrong.

If I have understood you correctly. You have confirmed that the retailers who participate in your service are sending Flux all the transaction information from all their customers to you, in some form, whether they are a Flux user or not!?

So when my friends and family, who are not Flux or Monzo users, purchase something at one of your retailers, they have their data shared with Flux? Without them knowing!?

I’m shocked at this. All the everyday customers can not know the retailers are sharing their transaction data with you. They should know and they should have a say. I can not comprehend how this hasn’t been raised by people, including the retailers.

There are many issues with this and the sharing of sensitive data. Going futher than the unknowns of privacy and the trust placed in a startup having the retailers entire customer transaction data, we’re relying on all the retailers data handling and security. The retailer systems are not uniform. There are many different types. There will be many points of risk if Flux are doing this in a custom fashion with each retailer.

The reality of what happens in order to provide the digital receipt is a great concern for me. Has this concern not been raised before!? I can not find any reference.

I am in the dark. At the least, I would like full breakdown on the information that is being shared between all the parties. What is private, what isn’t and how the process happens.

The FAQ’s say little beyond a few unhelpful lines of ambiguous sentences.

765

The way I read it was that if you are not registered with Flux, then there is no way of matching an individual with any data. It is just white noise. I don’t know how it works (nor particularly care) but I imagine it would be something like if an approval code in the white noise matches an approval code in Monzo, then that is how the match happens and the electronic receipt is generated. No personal data (for example, your name) needs to be shared from KFC to Flux that way.

It is naive to think that the retailers are not already using and selling anonymous data.

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766

Hi M_K :wave:

Rob is right - unless you’re a Flux customer, the information we receive from retailers is essentially meaningless. The information is essentially passed through our matching algorithm to see if there’s any data points that “match” a current Flux user. If there is a match, then our system can use those matched data points to “fill in the blanks” and compile a digital receipt. Without the information from the bank (which we only receive for Flux users), we can’t identify any single transaction from the retailer.

We’re an accredited Account Information Service Provider (authorised and monitored by the Financial Conduct Authority) and are subject to regular audits and compliance testing to ensure our data handling practices are as secure and fair as possible. We built Flux with the same level of security used by banks, and we also hold a number of other data security certifications. We understand that it’s a very serious responsibility to handle customers’ transaction information, and we work incredibly hard to ensure we’re doing this to the highest possible standards. We’ve also got very solid contracts in place with all of our partners (both banks and retailers) that ensure that we are legally obliged to protect any information we receive.

We try to be as transparent as we can about how and why we do things as we strongly believe in informed consent: everyone should understand how and why we use their data, and have the option to opt-out of the service. I’ve taken on board the feedback over the past few days that the information in our help files hasn’t quite nailed it in terms of explaining the intricacies of how we work, and I’m working to update these over the next week so that they’re clearer. If there’s any specific questions you have that you’re still unsure about, please do let me know and I’ll do my best to answer them for you :slightly_smiling_face:

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767

You sound like you’ve never bothered to read the privacy policies of any place you’ve ever had dealings with. your information that is shared is all documented, because it’s the law. The GDPR is a fantastic piece of legislation for citizens.

But you’re naive if you think the mountains of data your life churns out every second isn’t used like this in some way or other.

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768

It’s as much of a data breach as someone taking abandoned receipts from trolleys and self checkout machines.

It’s just a list of items with a date and time which gets sent to flux.

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769

Oh no, my secret Tangfastics addiction is revealed. The shame!!

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771

Hi all

I’m not sure how many of you follow us on social media so you may not have seen this - but this week we’ve released a new developer portal (christened Marvin 2.0 :wink:).

The purpose of the portal is to try to reach some of the smaller merchants and allow engineers working at UK retailers to test out our APIs and self-onboard to Flux. At the moment Marvin is only set up for direct integrations (so payments processed through iZettle, Stripe, Square etc. won’t be able to integrate in this way as some of the key information we need for matching is held by those third parties), but if there’s a big appetite for this we’ll definitely explore it in the future.

The URL to access Marvin is here if you’d like to take a look: https://marvin.tryflux.com/signup - please do pass it along to anyone who you think may be interested in testing it out!

We’d love as much feedback as possible, so please do let me know what you think :smile:

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772

I realise you’re joking, but this is exactly what I want!

I want to know that I bought 40 packs of Tangfastics in 2020 despite “cutting down” and that they cost £1.99 in Jan but I didn’t even notice that I was paying £2.45 for the same bag in November.

A spreadsheet of a years worth of Tesco purchases is the nerdy dream! :nerd_face:

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773

Yes, I have to agree, it’s the analysis of the receipt content we’re desperate for. That level of detail would be amazing.

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774

Hello everyone :wave:
Gathering some feedback from the community.
How would you feel about getting a notification saying “Your receipt is ready” and the list of items that you bought?
Question 1: Do you feel that’s a bit invasive?
Question 2: If the receipt is not available immediately after the transaction, would you be annoyed if you received a receipt notification potentially an hour later?

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775

Unless Flux is all of a sudden bringing on a load more merchants then to me it doesn’t really matter how it’s presented as those receipts are few and far between

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