VRPs - What's in a Name?

I had a great time at Open Banking Expo last week hearing all about the latest in OB innovation and sharing the journey we at Williams have been on towards implementing commercial VRPs as part of the Payit? pilot with NatWest and our Dutch friends PayByLink BV.

The benefits are clear

The benefits that merchants will be able to offer our customers through VRPs are genuine and tangible – better still, they are easily explained to our target audience (in Williams’ case, plumbers and heating engineers). The cost benefits to merchants could be spectacular.

 Commercial VRPs will make the customer’s payment journey a non-thing – which is exactly what a merchant desires, as the payment itself adds no value to a purchase. No future customer will consciously choose Williams because of our amazing, friction-free checkout process – but removing the risk of a card being declined online or the delay in-branch as they find said card and forget their PIN will have a palpable impact on their enjoyment of working with us – and leaves more time for a natter (sales opportunity) or another cup of our freshly-ground coffee (sales opportunity).

 So how do we get this to work?

The technical bits, at least for NatWest (who are so far ahead of the other banks that it starts to look a bit embarrassing) are done – much of the work was already done to comply with the mandated sweeping functionality. The regulatory bits, key amongst which are fair pricing, a permanent home and dispute resolution, will come, and coverage will start to improve once the other banks free themselves of their compliance mentality and realise what a great commercial opportunity VRPs represent.

The remaining significant issue then is adoption. How do we persuade customers, who have little interest – sorry, no interest – in payments technology, to migrate to the new payment method?

"VRP!" "WTF??"

As I argued last week at OB Expo, the payments industry has done itself no favours with Open Banking and VRPs in particular, in not coming up with a unified brand, or even a term, that end users can grasp. VRP? Either a nasty STI or possibly underwear showing through tight clothing, but not an obvious or memorable name for a payment type. 

For the Williams/Payit pilot, we have unilaterally coined the term Digital Debit since in our (admittedly very small) straw poll 70% of people could describe what they thought it might mean, vs 0% for “Variable Recurring Payments”.

My phrase now when talking to customers is ‘It’s Digital Debit - just like Direct Debit, only smarter and better’ which seems to reassure them that this is not anything too dangerous or radical – and that, sad to say, is where this needs to be pitched; as a small, boringly safe and fairly obvious step in our customers’ payment experience.

Would this work for your business? I’d love to hear from anyone in the merchant/retail community, from fintechs and (if there are any reading this) banks – let me know whether you think a Digital Debit brand will help the VRP cause.