For Elouise Lashley, running a restaurant with her fiance Adian Montaque is fun. “It’s all about having boundaries and respecting each other,” says the co-owner of Birmingham’s Adian’s Tropical Fusion. “He knows the cooking and the kitchen, and I deal with the front of house and reservations. Our different skills make us well-rounded. Plus our work ethic and passion are one and the same.”
The couple opened their restaurant – which offers dishes ranging from jerk salmon with a mango, passionfruit and yuzu dressing, to a mac-and-cheese pie – after they’d spent a combined four decades working in hospitality for other people. They wanted to reconnect with their roots and reflect the diversity of their city, while elevating Caribbean food, says Lashley. “We wanted to integrate bold flavours and ingredients from Asia, India and other tropical areas, to encourage customers to try something a bit different. Food is a vessel that brings people together.”
But as much as you might love your work, in today’s economic environment amid the cost of living crisis, many small businesses are not having an easy time. Lashley and Montaque, too, have had to deal with rising costs, and look to minimise their own outgoings wherever possible.
One of the areas where they have been able to make savings and efficiencies is around how they’re taking payments. The restaurant originally had two card machines attached to its till system. Lashley reduced it to one to save on the monthly fee, but quickly realised this was affecting the customer experience – at busy times, customers were having to wait to pay. Then one day she saw a waiter at another restaurant taking payments on their phone. “We did some research into phone payment systems, and found Viva.com, which we knew would work best for us,” she says.
Viva.com is a cloud-based European technology bank which supports businesses, no matter what their size, to accept payments on any device in a way that works for them. In July, iPhones were added to the list of devices supported by its Viva.com Terminal app, enabling UK merchants to seamlessly and securely accept in-person contactless payments with Tap to Pay on iPhone.
With around one out of every two smartphones in the UK being an iPhone, it means thousands of independent businesses such as convenience stores, restaurants, taxi drivers and hairdressers can use their iPhones to replace card terminals and accept payments.
“There was no annual commitment so we thought we’d give it a go,” says Lashley of the decision to choose Viva.com’s Terminal iOS app. “It’s been really good so far – we’re never worried about running out of paper or a card terminal malfunctioning any more.”
When the restaurant gets busy, they are able to take payments on up to three iPhones at no additional cost, by simply downloading the app to more devices. And it’s good for the customer experience. “They think it’s quite cool,” Lashley says. “Customers are intrigued by the new technology. It becomes a great talking point at the end of the meal.”
In Leicester, Joseph Fernando runs New Lucky Superstore. He’d been working in retail for two decades before taking the leap and starting his own business. He and his wife originally opened a shop in Derby, but sold up after four years when long hours and the commute became too much. While looking for an opportunity closer to home, he started working part-time at New Lucky for a friend. When the friend decided to sell, Fernando bought the business from him, seeing the perfect opportunity in a large shop with good footfall.
Fernando has plans to expand the product range, particularly around international food. “The biggest challenges right now are getting the prices right,” he says. “Because of everything going on in the economy, people don’t want to spend too much. Where my costs are going up, I can’t necessarily pass that on to the customer. I have to compare with other shops. There’s a lot of competition.”
He has always accepted card payments through a traditional terminal, but found the monthly fee and the maintenance costs for the hardware high. When he heard from a friend about the Tap to Pay on iPhone option with Viva.com, the fact that he could use his iPhone to take payments instead instantly appealed. And his customers seem to like the simplicity of it too: “It definitely has the wow factor,” he says.
For Fernando, being with Viva.com has numerous advantages: “You can use the business debit card to get cashback on your business shopping, which reduces the transaction fees for credit and debit card payments. The more you use your card, the more cashback you get,” he says. “But the best thing is Viva.com’s customer service. If you need help, they answer the phone and reply to emails straight away. Other companies use chatbots, or you have to wait 15-20 minutes on hold before you can speak to someone.”
Additionally, Viva.com recently introduced near-instant access to funds, with transactions settled in about an hour, 365 days a year, streamlining the way businesses can manage their daily expenses.
Back at Adian’s Tropical Fusion, Lashley and Montaque say that embracing advances in payments has given them other ideas of where else they might add technology to their business, such as handheld devices for taking orders. “It’s helping us think about where we can be even more efficient,” Lashley says.
Find out how Tap to Pay on iPhone with the Viva.com Terminal app could elevate the way you run your business
