Optimising credit card repayments through
Open Banking
Virgin Money delivers a range of market-leading banking products and services to almost 7 million customers and businesses across the UK.
70%
Cost reductions through savings on card scheme costs
2X
Smile score doubled in the period following the launch
↓
Reduction in customer complaints relating to the checkout
Customer
Virgin Money
Virgin Money delivers a range of market-leading banking products and services to almost 7 million customers and businesses across the UK. Virgin Money places a laser focus on optimising the digital journey for its customers, ensuring all interactions are as seamless and friction-free as possible. In 2024, Virgin Money used Open Banking as a way to make a credit card repayment, through Global Payments’ open banking solution, Bank Payment, with incredible results.
The challenge
Friction in the digital journey
With a purpose-led digital strategy, Virgin Money designs and builds outstanding customer experiences promoting digital-first interaction. However, in 2019, its chosen gateway for credit card repayments was causing frustration to customers. Accepting customer payments by debit card was its biggest complaint driver, and was negatively impacting its Smile score, Virgin Money’s key customer experience metric.
Virgin Money needed a gateway that would reduce complaints and drive higher acceptance rates. And to find a way to remove the need for customers to re-enter their address details for verification purposes, as this added friction to the digital journey.
"Our digital customer experience is at the heart of our business, so we had to make a change and choose a new provider who placed our customer - and their digital experience - first."
Nick Soulsby — Digital Product Strategy Manager, Virgin Money
The Solution
Seamless repayments with Open Banking
As payment partners, Global Payments and Virgin Money were in step on the technology that could best support a digital-first payment journey. To simplify the customer payment journey, Virgin Money first needed to switch its payment gateway to Global Payments, through a Hosted Payment Page. This delivered a ready-made, drop-in solution that created a seamless online payment experience, customisable to the Virgin Money brand.
The next step was to assess the type of payment methods that were offered to customers - and consider how an Open Banking-based payment method could simplify the payment experience. Virgin Money added Bank Payment to its checkout in early February 2024.
The Impact
Improved performance of checkout
Almost immediately, Virgin Money noticed an improvement in the performance of its credit card repayments. Soulsby notes, “In the first two weeks after launching Bank Payment, almost 50% of our customers actively chose Bank Payment as their preferred payment method. We believe that this is because Bank Payment removes the need for customers to enter card details or re-enter their address for verification, which helps us deliver the best possible digital experience”.
The Global Payments team helped Virgin Money to analyse customer activity on the payment page. For example, the team assessed where customers dropped out of the journey and implemented changes to minimise dropouts. The team also updated the payment journey to showcase the Virgin Money brand and then altered the Bank Payment choice to become more prominent on the payment page, which all had a positive impact on adoption rates.
Payment reporting also showed that once a customer chose to pay by Bank Payment, they didn’t revert back to card payment. And this was mainly due to the simplicity and speed of the Bank Payment journey.
Just six weeks after adding Bank Payment as a payment method to its checkout, 92% of Virgin Money customers chose Bank Payment over traditional debit card payment options. And, as a bespoke option, alternative payment options remain available as part of its vulnerable customer focus.
Additionally, in the months following the launch of Bank Payment, Virgin Money recorded its single biggest payment day - with customers making 40,000 repayments in one day - a record-breaker for Virgin Money, and one which showcases the resilience of both the payment gateway and the Bank Payment solution.
Soulsby added, “Bank Payment has been a game changer for Virgin Money. The technology is second to none, but it is also the experts at Global Payments that make it a success. Support doesn’t stop at launch. They are as invested as we are in making Bank Payment a success on our checkout.”
“Our high customer uptake rates correlate directly to continuous UI changes and enhancements. We really didn't know how good the customer journey was until we launched. So that expert input is absolutely crucial. Without building Bank Payment, we wouldn't have gotten to the stage we have got to, and we’re excited to see what’s next.”
"Without building Bank Payment, we wouldn't have gotten to the stage we have got to, and we’re excited to see what’s next."
Nick Soulsby — Digital Product Strategy Manager, Virgin Money
Innovation delivered
Next steps
In addition to providing the gateway and the Bank Payment solution, Global Payments deliver comprehensive and integrated reporting tools, along with the expertise to help turn those reports into tangible and actionable information. This in turn enables Virgin Money to focus on further honing and improving the digital customer journey, while sharing the story within the business so that other departments can mirror this success.
Working with Global Payments
Throughout the project, Global Payments:
- Delivered a seamless ecommerce integration on schedule.
- Added the Bank Payment method to the Virgin Money checkout and optimised the layout to encourage higher customer uptake.
- Achieved a usage rate of 46% in the two weeks following the launch of Bank Payment, increasing to 65% following optimisation and reaching to 92% within 6 weeks.
Key achievements on completion of the project
- Cost reductions of approximately 70% for Virgin Money through savings on card scheme costs.*
- Bank Payment on the Virgin Money checkout contributed to a Smile score that doubled in the period following the launch.
A reduction in customer complaints relating to the checkout for accepting credit card repayments. Ongoing analysis from the Global Payments team of customer behaviour, which introduced improvements to the payment page to enhance the customer experience.
*Cost savings calculated from Virgin Money for annual payment acceptance for year 2023 and removing the associated card scheme and interchange costs by transaction, which is the actual cost saving experienced since offering only Bank Payment on the checkout since Q2 2024.
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