Online approval and payment service VeeLoop originally developed to help young people shop online, started working on a solution only four weeks ago after contacting Sara Hill, a freelance business consultant who was volunteering for her local COVID-19 Mutual Aid group in North London.
Sara was experiencing problems taking payments for essentials like food from the vulnerable people she was supporting and posted a request on various fintech forums to ask if anyone had a solution for the payment problem. The VeeLoop team contacted her and they teamed up to create vHelp.
In four weeks, vHelp was up and running and helps safeguard vulnerable people while ensuring volunteers are getting reimbursed. The service also provides insight and an audit trail of volunteer activities for coordinators and organisations. Coordinators are given card readers to be used by volunteers who help with shopping.
Then volunteers can shop and take it to the vulnerable person, who will pay using the card reader, without contact. Volunteers upload receipts to the system and get paid immediately, and a transaction record and audit trail are created within vHelp.
A small pilot is currently being run with mutual aid groups in North London. The initiative has received support from a number of other businesses including iZettle, a PayPal service, who kindly donated card readers and covered the transaction fees for the pilot. Ignition Law, who helped develop the data protection policies, SimplyPayMe, who has donated their payment technology for the pilot and ‘Improve my UX’ who are helping us design the user experience.
We are so happy to be finalists for Start-Up of the year at the @WestLBusiness Awards 2020! Great to be shortlisted alongside so many great local organisations. https://t.co/Wh2zcsQcNV pic.twitter.com/HUScex5bAk
— VeeLoop (@vee_loop) January 9, 2020