Pennies, the fintech charity, has announced more partners supporting its digital charity box. Worldpay - one of the first organisations to join up - has already helped its first Pennies client, The Entertainer, unlock £1.4m for children’s charities. The company will soon enable Pennies for contactless payments and is supporting Pennies as one of two new national charity partners.

Whilst Zonal and Mastercard, the leading technology operators in the hospitality industry, are launching Pennies in their products - which will take the digital charity box further into the food, beverage and entertainment markets.

The Ecommerce market now represents 20% of all retail transactions and Pennies also announced that Demandware, a Salesforce company, platform customers can now join in the micro-giving movement following the development of a new plugin which makes it even easier for their merchants to enable this simple, data-free way of consumer donating.

Part of the success of Pennies is its adaptability for sectors and multi-channels. New Partner Hobbycraft has enjoyed immediate and unexpectedly high customer use in the arts and craft market, and Notcutts has just enabled 18 garden centres to support local causes. Both of these retailers were enabled by K3 Retail and Verifone.

Since its launch in 2010, Pennies has helped raise £7.5million for charity and works across over 50 retail partners - with more coming on board for 2017.

Alison Hutchinson CBE, CEO of Pennies said: “In the UK around a third of us leave the house with no cash, just cards so lose opportunities to give a little spare cash to charity. Pennies has therefore embraced fintech, working together with the payments and technology industry to give our digital small change a big purpose at the touch of a button.

“Currently UK consumers give through Pennies somewhere every 3 seconds - so we’re thrilled to be building on this momentum by working with leading payments partners to provide even more opportunities to join in.”
Dave Hobday, Managing Director, Worldpay UK said: “As a long-time supporter, we’re excited to be deepening our partnership with Pennies. By providing friction- free ways for consumers to donate at point of sale, we’re enabling retailers to implement secure and flexible methods for supporting good causes across the UK without impacting the customer experience.”

Zonal’s chief executive Stuart McLean said: “Being part of the hospitality industry we fully appreciate how charity fundraising sits at its very heart, so for Zonal it makes perfect sense to offer Pennies technology as part of our EPoS solutions.”

Jamie Merrick, head of industry insights at Demandware, a Salesforce company, said: “In this fast-paced retail environment, it’s essential to make it easier for both customers and retailers to donate. For us, building this micro-payment integration into the platform was an easy decision for a worthy cause. Any customer on the platform can use this function and customise it to suit their brand and needs.”

Tony Bryant, Business Development Director, K3 Retail said ‘The partnership between K3 Retail and Pennies demonstrates both the capacity and the potential for financial technology to be a force for social good. We are thrilled to have created a digital platform which allows for quick and easy micro-donations to be made, and the take-up and results so far indicate an exciting future for digital charity donations.”

Pennies estimates that if all of the UK’s card holders donated 30p a month, over £175million a year could be raised for the UK charity sector.