Instant Invoices - Powered by Yapily

Inspiration

The UK Freelance and Small Business Market relies heavily on the payment of invoices with long, manual payment cycles. Invoices are often paid late and this issue has worsened since the pandemic, with new research [FSB] showing a huge £23bn late payment crisis - hitting the UK small business market hard estimating 50,000 SMEs collapsing every year due to customers paying them late [Juno]. With almost one and a half hours a day spent chasing payments, these SMEs are left uncertain over their cash flow, directly affecting their relationship with the client and most importantly paralyzing their ability to grow and innovate.

What it does

Our proposed service sits as a plug-in to accounting software and invoice management solutions, which generates a VRP initiation payload from an assessment of a business accounts transaction history and most commonly paid suppliers. In our user journey, this is a small business owner, managing the invoices that he is sending out to his clients. The VRP request is then sent to the payer (the client) for approval by Strong Customer Authentication (SCA). The long lasting VRP consent then exists between the supplier and the client, paying all future invoices submitted instantly.

This will enable easy invoice management for those businesses paying suppliers, and will also ensure suppliers themselves get paid on time, every time.

How we built it

Our solution consists of both a backend service built in Spring Boot to securely serve connections to Ozone’s APIs and a front-end application built in Vue.js.

As an infrastructure provider for other TPPs in the open banking ecosystem, we recognise the importance of security when dealing with open banking certificates and highlight the need to provide a secure vault for adding certificates as well as controls to management certificates as they are revoked or require regeneration.

For the purpose of the hackathon, we have built a few minimal services and controllers to expose the Ozone endpoints in a lightweight API.

The Vue.js front end application can be run locally to host our front-end solution which makes API calls to our backend service. This mocks up a business who receives invoices which can be automatically paid through an existing VRP consent. For demonstration purposes, the user can toggle on an auto pay feature which is disabled for the demo in order to make it clear that a payment is taking place from an invoice.

Challenges we ran into

The sandbox itself wasn't originally working with java, and we had to work around getting the sandbox to accept our certificates. We also found it challenging mapping out the different actors in the product flow, but we resolved this by mapping each individual user journey and how they each interacted with the product.