I’ve always assumed that retailers get anonymised data back from Flux for being part of the scheme. “A person who bought that family bucket of chicken also spent double at the burger place” kinda thing, adding value over just ‘emailed receipts’.
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And in 10 years, life insurance will be hooked up to open banking and you can kiss goodbye to your cover if you eat too much crap, or buy fags. Ah, the future of giving away your data. You’re welcome.
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So what I deduce from this is we need Apple to take what Flux is doing and build it into Apple Pay. Then they can return to the proposition of transforming the wallet app into a financial hub that provides the interface and tools for banks to plug into instead of building their own apps.
Why does it feel like almost every good technological advancement comes at the cost of privacy and nudges us closer to an Orwellian society unless it’s built by Apple (with very few exceptions). Surely they’ve not got a monopoly on privacy too?
In the future I can see privacy becoming a USP of sorts, in the same way veganism, eco friendliness, and good ethics are now. I think that’ll be a real shame, yet at the same time, for those of us that do care about this, we’ll finally have some real choices and competition when it comes to privacy focused products.
Monzo are usually ahead of the curve with movements such as that, and we saw small digs at competitors when it came to plus in the privacy aspect. If they went all in on that. And guaranteed a privacy first approach with stuff like this with plus, I’d sign back up in a heartbeat and probably never cancel.
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Apple have the money to do it that way. Most other companies need the info to sell it.
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That’s not the only way to monetise and churn a profit from services like this surely?
Sure, Apple are happy to absorb and subsidise the cost from other areas to initially build these things, but Apple Pay, as a complete standalone product is self sustaining now, they don’t need to subsidise it, because banks, merchants, and card issuers pay for it. They pay for it because it becomes a selling point for their customers. For shops it gives their customers another reason to shop with them over a competitor, for issuers it gives banks a reason to partner with them, and for banks it gives their customers a reason to keep banking with them.
A service like Flux could be treated the same way, if not sold directly to bank customers. They don’t need to monetise the data to make it a financial success. As Tim Cook so aptly put it recently, that’s just the path of least resistance.
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As long as the data is being used anonymously (ovi whole thing on how we define that and to what extent), I don’t think there’s any issue here. You can sell data anonymously too.
Apple ofc have improved Apple maps no end through heavy data use, but incredibly anonymised.
And a little different but DuckDuckGo sell ads but no data, again a huge difference to the rest of the industry but still works.
(Not sure I’m disagreeing with you even a little bit, just trying to add some thoughts)
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Apple don’t need Flux. They could get the data from Apple Pay directly if they pushed it as an integration point but they won’t as by Flux is doing goes against their privacy ethos - as others have mentioned Flux may be accessing anonymised data from the retailers.
Hey Nathan! Nothing I can share publicly, I’m afraid! We’ve all just got our heads down, preparing like mad for April 12th when non-essential retailers can finally open their doors!
As a company, our number one goal is still getting new retailers on board. We’ve got some other interesting bits happening as well (which we’ll be able to share more about in the coming months), but retailers are our predominant focus at the moment.
I know that’s a bit of a ‘nothing’ update and I’m sorry about that 
I’m happy to share some of the stuff I’ve been working on in my team that you might find interesting, though! My two key focuses for the start of this year have been around sustainability and data ethics.
On the sustainability front, I’m preparing to launch some research we did with the Carbon Trust last year around the carbon footprint of receipts. I’ve also been exploring ways that we could start including carbon scoring on our receipts. I wonder - is this something you’d find useful?
And with regard to data ethics, I’m focusing on how we can formally include ethical decision-making into our product design processes, and how we can use ethical thinking to enhance our (already pretty great!) risk and compliance assessments. As a company that processes a lot of data, it’s really important to us that we’re operating to the highest possible standard, and a big part of that for me is making sure we don’t only think about what we’re legally required to do, but also what we should do, morally and ethically.
So, hopefully there’ll be some pretty interesting developments in these two spaces over the coming months (as well as some more exciting retailer announcements)! We’re really preparing to step it up a gear when everything re-opens, so I’m expecting the rest of the year to be pretty hectic for us 
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Are there any updates on Flux? I can see there’s been a long-running major outage with H&M - which is a shame - any new retailers on the horizon etc? 
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So far it’s been ages with no news whatsoever, constant promises of new retailers and… Nothing.
I can see a game of cat and mouse chasing here, a merchant changes or updates their till system it takes AGES for Flux to react and be able to fix. KFC being the case in point here (long time broken and no automatic loyalty anymore) and now possibly long term issues with H&M.
I like the idea of requesting no receipt but can’t if there’s any possibility of no digital receipts, no warning was made before my recent H&M purchase so lucky I grabbed a receipt.
H&M didn’t give me a choice, threw all the receipts in the bag, didn’t get an option of no receipt 
I hear you - it’s super frustrating for us as well. This particular incident has been caused on H&M’s side, so it’s a bit of a waiting game for us while they get it sorted 
The KFC issue was similar - a problem on their side that we weren’t able to fix ourselves, we just had to wait until they finished updating their system. It’s one of the biggest challenges of being an infrastructure company that connects banks and retailers - there are three different pieces of the puzzle, and if one goes wrong it affects the other two.
The good news on the H&M front is that we’ve found a way to backfill receipts (though it’s a bit of a manual process), so we’re working on that while we wait for the actual fix to go in. Every time something like this happens, it’s a learning opportunity for us and a good way to identify gaps that we weren’t aware were there. This one has shown us that our external escalation process could be better, so I’ve kicked off a project this morning to improve it for next time.
Regarding new merchants - the sales pipeline is really strong at the moment and there’s a lot of promising conversations happening 
Understandably, merchants have been flat out getting stores opened but it looks like the pressure is relaxing a little now which means that things should start to accelerate 
Wish I could be more specific with timeframes, but unfortunately we can’t really say anything until the builds are done and we know when we’re going live!
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The big question - do you believe you have a sustainable business plan? You have been at it over two years with pretty much nothing to show for it, and are reliant on retailers never changing or upgrading systems.
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The short answer to this question - I do
The reason I’m so confident about this is because I see all the work going on behind closed doors. From the outside, I know it looks like we’re stagnant. But the reality is that things are moving incredibly fast internally and I really do believe we’ve nailed the product-market fit. With new technology like ours, it’s always going to be a long, hard graft to get the wheel turning. But once we hit that momentum, it’ll just grow faster and faster - believe it or not, Flux is actually being adopted faster than contactless technology was during the first few years after it launched.
It feels like it’s been forever from your perspective because you were all our earliest adopters! Throw in the 12 months that COVID paralysed the retail sector, and I can understand why it seems like nothing has happened for years But big things are going to happen for us this year, I’m sure of it 
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Flux are now live in Dozens - We’re live with Dozens!. Dozens becomes the fourth UK financial… | by Samantha Lind | Jul, 2021 | TryFlux
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Shame no new merchants have been added for a very long time… 
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Flux seems a cool idea but seems to have been pretty stagnant for so long. I’d find it useful as the Colonels Club scanners at my local KFC are always broken but that integration died a quick death.
I’ve been waiting for a Slim Chickens reciept that says it’s a “Boparan” receipt since Saturday. (in Starling not Monzo.) I wouldn’t mind but I’ve no idea who Boparan even are!?
Overall if I thought I’d need to take anything back (H and M had issues recently) I’d still grab a reciept, too many bugs and whenever a client changes their system it seems to be a long slog and chase for things to be fixed.
Flux is a great idea but in my opinion not ready for prime time, especially when there’s a small number of stores and any change can seeming break intergration for months; imagine managing many brands this way!?