What do you want the RAYL brand to be known for?
Honest, transparent, great value financial services company to provide solutions to the problems SMEs face with traditional banking institutions.
I look at my bank statements, I see the charges and I have no idea what they are for. It irks me to see how much these banks take in fees and the lack of service I receive in return. I don’t know what I’m paying for.
I come to England. My card doesn't work. So, I must go out of my way to find a bank and find identity to prove I’m me. I feel like they are putting hurdles in front of me to make it harder for me to do what I want to do with my money. It is annoying to have to go and get cash so, I can take my daughter to lunch because they don't expect me to be in the United Kingdom and now my credit card won’t work. They don't know me. They don't care who I am. I'm just a number. And it’s not just this one trip.
In December, I left Budapest I had breakfast, paid for it with my card. Arrived in Munich had lunch, paid for it with my card. Arrived in Vancouver, tried to check into a hotel and they said, I can’t because my card is blocked. I call the bank and the guy says “We think it can’t be you” – Trust me, it’s me. We go through a couple of transactions and he says, “How could you have breakfast in Budapest, lunch in Munich, and dinner in Vancouver?” I said, “It’s called an aeroplane.” Now, I’m justifying my expenditure with my money to an Indian Call Centre and I’m thinking, this not how it should be.
I want to build a solution where RAYL uses the data, with the customer's permission, to know the customer and their business better so we can provide better service, lower costs, and access to same day financing. That's my whole raison d’etre, because we can provide small and medium sized business owners the solutions they need with the understanding they deserve.
Customers who use our business applications to run their operations, marketing, sales, and communications can provide us with permission to access their data to help us make the right decisions when it comes to their financial needs. RAYL will be able to bring up a customer’s profile and see this is where he travels. These are the products he uses. Yes, he has a residence in Hungary. Yes, he's in Vancouver, perhaps he’ll be in United Kingdom for a week with family, and he flew through Munich to get there. But RAYL won’t stop his credit card because it doesn't know why he is in London.
RAYL will see there are charges in three countries and will analyse his past charges to discover, “Yes, that is usual for him to be travelling between these countries.” Some of the big financial services brands do this, but I would say it's only a few, most would just flag the card as suspicious and block it from being used. I want to use the RAYL Super App to know the customer better so we can give the customer a better product, better pricing, a better risk profile, and a better financial concierge.
The conversation would go more like this, “Hi, Nicholas, can I go you, Nicholas?” “Yes.” “Hi, Nicholas. How are you? Perfect. Okay, I can see that Budapest this morning. Great breakfast. Munich. Clearly that's where you transited through and see that for lunch, and you now want to check into the hotel absolutely. We are sorry that we flagged it, but we needed to verify. Do you feel comfortable with a couple of security questions because we want to protect your money?” We won’t block the card and render it completely useless and send a new card to your home address while you are travelling in a different part of the world. It’s a completely different attitude. That is where I think RAYL should be and we can use the data we collect, with the client’s permission, to drive better decisions.
The Canadian system does not benefit the FinTech market because there is no open banking architecture. It will change in 2023 with a new law, but for now there is still a problem. If I'm a merchant, I might want to increase my credit card limit. I go to the bank, and say, I'd like the new credit card limit and they take a bit of time. In the meantime, I find this other company called Pink Flamingo, which will increase my credit limit, but they must send a request to my main bank to get my information and my bank doesn’t have to give it to them. Pink Flamingo doesn’t get my credit information, so they cannot decide to provide my business with credit.
RAYL won’t need to access data from another institution because we will be able to access data, with our customer’s permission, to make the decision. I say to Mr. Merchant, “May I open up your data analytics to access your data so we can make an accurate decision?” “Yes.” Now I can literally see what is going on. “Great you had a fantastic month last month and you need more money because you sold more product last month than the month before.” It is clear why they need the money, and we can make a better decision when loaning funds to our customers.
Discover more about RAYL's solution and its CEO, Nicholas Jeffery by listening to the podcast or watching the below video.
How RAYL is Structured
RAYL has three parts. There is RAYL.Apptive, a super app, which is a set of tools to help businesses with their productivity, sales, marketing, communications, and finances. In the middle we have RAYL.Pay, which is a merchant payment platform to provide better payment processing. The third is RAYL.Financial, which is a challenger bank.
If you go into any merchant and ask, “How much do you pay in credit card processing fees?” They will go through their list of transactions and the merchant is almost embarrassed because as he goes over each line item, he’s adding them up and maybe there is a rebate in there they aren’t sure about and after they add it all up and it’s like oh wow, that’s a lot.
If RAYL has transparency, and we say, “Cost plus zero”, whatever we are charged for the transaction, that is what we pay you. If the transaction is $1,000, we charge the merchant $1,000. We don’t need to mark it up. Let's say merchant wants their funds on the same day. They ask, “how much is that going to cost me to get cash today?” 1% “We just saved them 1.7% over and above that, so they are still in the money if they want same day clearing.
We can then put their money onto a card for them to use. This is branding for me because now the merchant is going to be carrying around a RAYL Card, which needs to look WOW, what’s that? It needs to capture customer’s attention and give them a sense of ‘Extra’. It's a piece of plastic, but Wow, what is that?
To learn more about Nicholas Jeffery and RAYL, listen to the podcast or watch the video of BrandAPeel: Brand Storytelling in the Digital Age podcast.
RAYL Innovations Inc is based in Vancouver BC, where a group of seasoned, banking and technology professionals, from around the world came together in 2020, to reinvent and reinvigorate the merchant payment platform without any commercial compromises or technology weak links.
RAYL has taken the concept of our competition and increased customer retention with a dramatically improved customer lifetime value (CLV) and a significant opportunity to improve financial performance well beyond current industry standards.
Constructing Brand Stories and Digital Footprints
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