Behind the scenes – Migrating to Direct Flex
I thought I’d give you a little bit of behind the scenes info on how Flex works and some changes we are making.
Today, when you make a transaction on Flex it’s actually processed with the current account as an intermediary. By initially building Flex in this way we could re-use more of the customer support tooling, dispute processing and other functionality of the current account.
The processing looks like the following:
The net impact on the current account is £0 but there is an inflow and an outflow.
Here is the same transaction as displayed in part of our tooling:
This results in two transactions on the current account, one negative one and one positive one. In the feed in the app these are collapsed and hidden but they do appear in statements:
So, what are we changing?
We are now migrating to “direct virtual card” where we will no longer bounce money via the current account on the way to Mastercard. All staff accounts have been running in this mode for several months and we are planning to start a gradual customer rollout next week.
What will change?
Hopefully, mostly nothing but if migrated you may notice:
- Flex will appear as an account via Open Banking and can be connected to third parties (if they support it)
- Flex transactions will no longer clutter up bank statements on the current account and Flex statements will look a bit better