The Fintech company who also picked up the ‘Best International Card Not Present Solution’ at the CNP Awards in San Francisco, earlier this week have worked alongside their sister company, Gala Tent, the largest manufacturer and retailer of commercial quality marquees and gazebos in the UK, in order to trial the pilot, which will enable cardholders to complete transactions, whilst face to face with an employee, albeit via video technology.

Gala Technology Commercial Director, Steven Jones commented ‘Remote virtual meetings are now commonplace, and usage has increased massively across a range of digital platforms.

Zoom are boasting that users have soared from 10 million daily meeting participants back in December to 300 million in April and rivals like Microsoft Teams and Google Meet are also showing significant traction. Microsoft reported a 70% growth in the last month to 75 million daily users and recorded 200 million meeting participants in a single day in April.

This evidences that these technologies have become a way of life, albeit somewhat enforced during the COVID-19 pandemic. We believe that they will continue to be used as part of the ‘new normal’ as organisations consider life after lockdown, with continued social distancing and working from home expected.

It was our thought process that whilst these platforms are used predominantly for either B2B meetings or a way for families and friends to engage with each other remotely, we could encourage business to open up the facility to firstly interact with their customers ‘face to face’ and then to accept secure and compliant B2C payments via this method, by using our SOTpay technology which already supports merchants across telephony, web chat, SMS and social media channels.”