Fintech startup Flux partners with Barclays for itemised receipts

Flux, the London fintech startup founded by former early employees at Revolut, has announced a partnership with Barclays in the U.K. that will see it trial its itemised receipt technology with 10,000 of the bank’s customers.

The young company has built a software platform that bridges the gap between the itemised receipt data captured by a merchant’s point-of-sale (POS) system and what little information typically shows up on your bank statement or mobile banking app.

A quick reminder of how Flux works: Once you have switched on the functionality in your banking app, instead of only seeing the total transaction cost for each purchase in your statement, if you spend at one of Flux’s partner merchants you can see a full item-level break down.

This extra captured data can also potentially do other useful things, such as power rewards programs, or help you understand your spending better with, for example, much more granular categories e.g. what did I spend on coffee this week, not how much did I spend eating out.

Flux says that Barclays customers taking part in the trial through the Barclays Launchpad app will see their receipts in real time, including all purchases, with VAT, delivered directly to the app.

“Users can take ownership of their financial data by going paperless and keeping track of everything they buy without having to download extra apps or changing any behaviour,” notes the company.

We are also told that if the pilot is deemed by Barclays to be a success, it has the potential to be rolled out to the 5 million customers using the main Barclays Mobile Banking App.

On the merchant side, the trial also sees Flux partnering with Barclaycard, which will provide the ability for merchants, via integration through their point-of-sale devices, to issue digital receipts to any customer. This is noteworthy since Flux’s chicken and egg problem is that it needs merchants to adopt its technology in order to persuade banks that it is worth partnering. To date, this includes all 111 EAT stores in the U.K. and Bel-Air.

In addition to today’s announced Barclays tie-in, which came about after Flux went through the Techstars-powered Barclays accelerator, the startup has also integrated with challenger bank Starling and is running a small pilot with Monzo.