Interview: Matty Cusden-Ross, CEO and Founder, Flux
RTIH talks digital receipts with Flux CEO and Founder, Matty Cusden-Ross, pictured above right alongside Tom Reay (CTO) and Veronique Barbosa (COO).
RTIH: Tell us about Flux
MCR: Flux is a digital receipts data platform on a mission to eradicate paper receipts once and for all. Our infrastructure instantly sends item-level digital receipts immediately to customers’ banking apps.
What we very quickly realised is that when a retailer hands over a paper receipt, they often hand over their knowledge of that customer too.
There’s no way for them to understand whether that customer returned, or what they purchased, without having them download a separate app or signing up to a loyalty scheme and swiping two cards at the till.
We’re positioned to help resolve that by feeding back aggregated and anonymised data to retailers. They can then make informed decisions on how to entice certain groups of customers back into their store and make them stick.
We also realised that given our significant coverage of UK bank customers integrated with Flux, we’re able to offer a much more representative view of a retailer’s customers than those who are likely to opt in to a store scheme to supplement a retailers loyalty program.
As a result we’ve built on our original infrastructure to produce a truly valuable tool for retailers, whilst at the same time helping them become more sustainable.
RTIH: What was the inspiration behind setting the company up?
MCR: The idea for Flux came about when we actually contemplated how bizarre it is that in this day and age you can pay with a tap of your card, phone or watch, but then the till spits out a piece of medieval technology.
We began on our mission to reduce the 11 billion paper receipts that are produced every year in the UK initially for environmental reasons.
Over 200,000 trees are unnecessarily felled every year to produce these receipts, never mind the billions of litres of oil and water. What you end up with is an unrecyclable scrap of paper full of toxic substances.
As we looked into the issue more though, it dawned on us that they aren’t even fit for purpose. Over 90% of receipts end up discarded or too faded to use. So not only are they damaging, they aren’t even useful to customers.
RTIH: How have you fared in 2020?
MCR: It’s fair to say 2020 hasn’t been without its challenges.
As a company with 50% of our business invested in retail footfall there’s been some less than ideal conditions on the high street. The pandemic has undoubtedly been our biggest hurdle since we started.
That said, Covid-19 has presented some opportunities for us and our retail partners in regards to what customers now expect in-store. We’ve seen entire towns and cities become completely contact-free this year, with perspex screens and one way systems being implemented everywhere.
However, there is a clear disconnect when a customer is then handed a paper receipt from the cashier around the side of a screen.
We were very fortunate that in 2019 we had already diversified to partner with e-commerce only businesses and delivery platforms, so the impact of our physical retailers being forced to close was offset by a boom in online sales.
There is a saying that good luck is when opportunity meets preparation. That diversification was key for us and saw us through the first UK lockdown. We quickly looked at which aspects of our business strategy needed to be paused or accelerated - and moved the slider accordingly.
We decided to push through a lot of increasingly important features that were further down our roadmap, such as barcode functionality to allow contact-free item returns at our fashion partners like schuh.
Other priorities included doubling-down on automation to streamline integration of our retailer API and also to ensure we’re positioned to service e-commerce only partners as consumer spend moves more online.
RTIH: What are the biggest challenges facing the omnichannel retail sector right now?
MCR: We believe the biggest challenge facing omnichannel retailers right now will be having to take tough decisions about the future of their physical real estate and online logistics distribution setups.
As a technology solution that services a number of different distribution channels this is something we have a birds eye view of.
Huge measures have already been taken to ensure Covid compliance this year at great cost and we can only hope that this is paid back in renewed consumer confidence in 2021, particularly as the first vaccinations are now being administered.
RTIH: What's the best question about your company or the market asked of you recently by a.) an investor and b.) a customer?
MCR: Customers are always keen to hear about other applications for our digital receipts product. We get asked about when we’ll team up with x or y app to give them even more item-level data in their banking app.
One thing that often comes through is about product recalls. Now that our customers see they can have a live link back to a purchase in their banking app, they don’t expect to have to hear about product recalls on the news, or navigate to a manufacturer’s webpage to check their model number.
With Flux activated, all parties know exactly what was purchased and when, so there should be functionality for a push notification.
RTIH: What can we expect to see from Flux in 2021?
MCR: We’re very much anticipating this accelerated move towards contact-free to continue.
Our latest figures show that our automatic digital receipts are now growing at three times the rate that contactless payments were implemented, so there’s a clear trajectory for us towards becoming the industry standard - which is really exciting.
We’re also upping the ante on a data analytics perspective and are hoping to come to market with a number of solutions to really help retailers understand how to acquire and retain more customers.
We’ve tapped into a whole host of item-level data and now this has become a representative set we are looking at how we can harness this to help drive business objectives.
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