Looking back on 2023 and to the year ahead

At the end of 2022, I had been with Cashflows for seven months and had only just begun implementing change across the business. Now we're here at the end of 2023, feeling very much like time has flown, and I want to take this opportunity to take a moment to reflect on how far we have come over the course of the past year.

This year, we have continued to focus on our people, not only making several new appointments but also seeing some of our best move into more senior roles across the business. It’s our people who are our strength, delivering cutting-edge payments technology, innovative solutions, and seamless experiences for our customers and partners. Supporting them to achieve and grow is definitely a priority, and this was reflected in our last employee satisfaction survey, achieving a 75% engagement rate, a great score for our industry.

The ongoing successes of our people are evidenced by the constant innovation of our products and services. Several of these were released this year, including our award-nominated Fast Onboarding platform, making boarding new customers easier and more secure than ever; Cashflows Advance, offering a flexible non-traditional funding option for eligible businesses; Embedded Frames, our iFrame solution, which removes the need for online shoppers to be redirected to a new window to finalise their payment; and SmartPOS, our new card machine option, introducing a simplified and more intuitive experience. We also completed a 12-week project of optimisation across the business to improve our change delivery process, alongside new automated testing and new change assessment, improving the quality and quantity of delivered changes.

These improvements in our solutions have been recognised industry-wide in this year’s awards, with Cashflows being finalists in the Card and Payments Awards 2024 in two categories: ‘Best Application of AI or ML in Financial services’ and ‘Best Industry Innovation’, with particular reference to the development of our industry-unmatched Fast Onboarding solution. We also won the award for ‘Best Online Payments Solution-Merchant’ category in the Payments Awards 2023, placing in the TechRound Fintech 50 and winning ‘Fintech Employer and Best Customer Service’ in the Fintech Awards.

This year, we also conducted the first of what will be an ongoing series of biannual net promoter score surveys, committing to further improve our understanding of our customers and partners. These industry-standard surveys will help us not only benchmark our customer satisfaction against the industry but also allow us to gain vital feedback from the businesses we serve. 

2024 is looking to be another exciting year for Cashflows, with further product developments asset to provide our customers and partners with even more options, insights, and personalisation when it comes to their payments. We can’t wait to continue to support these businesses to grow alongside us.