Nubar

For operators

Take the hold off the door.

The pre-authorisation hold sets your maximum basket, appears on your customers' statements as a charge they did not make, and produces the complaints your staff answer. Nubar replaces it with a verified account and a record that follows that account across every machine on the network.

Register interest

What changes

Four things, and none of them is a new machine.

The basket stops having a ceiling

A ten pound hold is a ten pound limit on what any one customer can take, which is a limit on what you can sensibly stock. Without it, the ceiling is whatever the customer picks up.

The complaints stop

Nothing is reserved, so nothing appears on a statement that the customer has to ring somebody about. You are no longer explaining a bank's release timetable on behalf of a bank.

The customer stops enrolling

They enrol once, with Nubar, and every participating machine from every manufacturer opens the same way. Your machines inherit an account they already have.

The door can check an age

Every machine defaults to sixteen and over. The customer verifies once, through a provider certified under the government’s own framework, and the door will not open for anybody who has not. Nubar keeps the confirmed answer and never a date of birth.

Alongside what you already run

This is not a vending management system.

Keep the software that ties your estate together, and the telemetry feeding it. Nubar is not that and does not want to be. It answers a different question: who is at this door, and can it open without holding anybody’s money. Nothing has to be replaced for it to work.

What it does show you is every Nubar door on one scale, whoever made the machine, counted only in money that actually arrived.

nubar.uk/operator/performance
The performance overview on a laptop: twelve months of takings, headline figures, and a banner offering July's monthly summary.

Twelve months at a glance. Any month opens as its own summary, and when a month finishes the page says so.

nubar.uk/operator/performance/patterns
The week as a heatmap on a laptop: seven days by twenty-four hours, the busy hours in deeper blue, over a chosen range from four weeks to twelve months.

The week, hour by hour, over any range from four weeks to a year. The lunchtime stripe is when the restocking van should leave.

The business shown is Riverside Vending, the demonstration operator built into the product. Its machines, sites and figures are invented.

The money

It never passes through us.

Every basket settles directly from the customer's card into your own account. You are the merchant of record. Nubar holds no customer money, no operator money, and no money in transit. This is how the system is built rather than a promise about how it is run.

Nubar's fee is taken automatically at settlement, at a rate set per operator. The default is one per cent. It can be set to zero for a pilot.

One basket Settlement
Customer is charged
Two items, itemised on the receipt
£4.30
Into your account
Direct from the card, same as any card sale
£4.26
Nubar fee
One per cent, deducted at settlement
£0.04

Fees round down, in your favour. Card processing is your existing arrangement and is unchanged. Refunds are issued by you from your own dashboard, and Nubar's fee is returned in proportion.

Neutrality

Nubar is not owned by one side of the market.

Nubar does not manufacture machines, does not own them and does not stock them. It talks to the manufacturer's cloud service, whoever the manufacturer is.

That is not a marketing position. A trust network owned by one machine maker is worth nothing to everybody else, and would recreate exactly the patchwork of incompatible schemes that the sector already has. Your customer's account has to work at the next operator's machine, or it is not a network.

Operators see their own machines, their own sessions and a reference for each customer. They never see a customer's identity, and never anything that customer did at anybody else's machines.

What we are asking for today

Not a contract, and not a commitment to buy anything. Nubar is in build, no machines are running on the network, and payments are in test mode. What is useful right now is twenty minutes of your time and an honest account of how payment works at your machines today, including the parts where Nubar would be no help at all.

If a pilot makes sense later, the fee can be set to zero for it. That conversation is a long way after this one.

Register interest

Be the first to know when Nubar is ready.

Payment, stock, servicing, vandalism, siting, anything at all. We are trying to find out what actually matters to operators rather than what we have assumed, so an answer that has nothing to do with Nubar is a useful answer.

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