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 Who carries a failed payment?

What changes

Three 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 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.

The hard question

So who carries a failed payment?

This is the honest weak point of any system that opens a door before the money moves, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a paragraph of reassurance.

Before anything else, the system repairs

Most failed payments are expired cards, not theft. The account is paused the moment a payment fails, and the payment is retried on the day, and again after one, three and five days. The customer is told each time. A paused account cannot open another door.

If all four attempts fail, the account is blocked at every machine on the network, from every operator, until it settles. That block is what makes it reasonable to open a door on no money, and it is worth more than a ten pound hold because it does not expire and it is not limited to your estate.

Then the debt is still yours

If nothing is recovered, the unpaid amount is a debt the customer owes you. It is an ordinary trade receivable and an asset you own. Nubar does not take it from you and does not decide what happens to it.

Nubar Recovery

We offer to buy the debt.

Once automated recovery is exhausted, Nubar makes a standing offer to buy that receivable at 40 per cent of its face value. You decide, debt by debt, from your dashboard. It is never automatic.

If you accept, the debt is legally assigned to Nubar, the customer is given written notice that the creditor has changed, and Nubar collects it in its own name and for its own account. Whatever Nubar recovers is Nubar's. If Nubar recovers nothing, Nubar carries the loss. You keep the purchase price either way.

There is no fee for access to this, no tier to be on, and no charge if you never use it. The purchase price is the only money that changes hands.

Not yet available. This is built and tested, and it is switched off. It cannot buy a single debt until written legal advice on the structure is in. We would rather tell you it exists and is inert than not mention it.

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

Tell us how your machines take payment.

No cost, no commitment, and no mailing list. A person reads every one of these.

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.

We use these details to reply to you and to understand the market, and for nothing else. We do not share them, and we do not run a mailing list. See the privacy notice.