QikServe Payments

A payments and reconciliation portal built on Stripe Connect, processing almost £50m in its first year, designed for hospitality operators rather than e-commerce teams.

Client
QikServe
Timeframe
2021
A hand holding a phone over a restaurant table of shared dishes and drinks, the phone showing an ordering and bill screen

Payments was the part of the QikServe platform where a guest's order turned into money in an operator's account. Stripe Connect was the underlying technology, and in its first year it processed almost £50m.

Why we built on top of it

What we built on top was a fully integrated payments and reconciliation portal for hospitality operators. That was Dan Rogers' vision and he was right about it. The payment infrastructure that came over from fintech, even the best of it, was built for e-commerce, and hospitality is different in ways that matter.

Tips are the obvious one. E-commerce tends to have one entity. Hospitality has multiple locations, franchises, layers, divisions and groups, any of which may run different POS and payment systems. Taxes and refunds behave differently too.

The difference people forget is more fundamental than any of that. If you buy a pair of jeans online, they were probably made months ago and moved through a warehouse. A sandwich is made at the point of order. That changes the expectations, the refund window and the psychology of the payment itself.

Tips, splits, charge to room / what e-commerce payments never had to handle.

What design owned

Not the payment flows. Design owned what was surfaced and in what order. At its most basic it meant an operator could reconcile their online ordering payments inside their own online ordering platform, which saved a great deal of time. Inside the dashboard, the information was laid out differently, because a different hierarchy of importance applies.

E-commerce has more digitally native people in those seats. A lot of hospitality staff are not as comfortable with the tooling, and if you are running a local franchise network because you worked your way up, you may never have been exposed to a payments dashboard with dozens of payment types for what look like the same thing. We had to surface everything and simplify that complexity at the same time, without losing the absolute accuracy and transparency financial reconciliation requires.

It was a complex product in a lot of ways: a great many connections, a great deal of regulation, exchange rates and their technicalities, and a customer base we had to educate as we went. Stripe Connect is a fantastic system and we still had to do a substantial amount around it. The payments flowed through as a revenue share for QikServe, which made it a commercial goal as well as a product one.

It was one of my favourite projects.

The operator dashboard / a hierarchy built for hospitality.

Payments design gets judged on whether an operator trusts the numbers at the end of the month.

Who made it

Dan Rogers, whose vision it was. Lesley Cross, Head of Payments. Chris Timms, Head of Product Management. Renan Stuchi, Lead Engineer.