Case studies

Open banking for charities – Wonderful

23 February 2022

The Wonderful Organisation started life in 2016 with a simple aim – to change the face of the UK’s charitable giving platforms by enabling 100% fee-free fundraising and to reach as many charitable organisations as possible.

However, although the team negotiated reduced card processing fees, as the Wonderful platform gained traction, it saw its growth and ability to reach more organisations and donors stunted. More income simply meant more expense.

But open banking changed that.

By implementing open banking and its account-to-account (A2A) payments, Wonderful instantly stopped incurring card processing costs, enabling the non-profit to continue its growth unimpeded.  The organisation:

  • Counts more than 800 charities registered on its platform, including big-hitters such as Cancer Research UK and Amnesty International.
  • Has processed a total of £6 million in donations to date.
  • Sees around eight new charity registrations each day.

Wonderful uses Citizen’s account-to-account (A2A) payments platform to process all its donations. The Citizen platform offers a single-view dashboard to view and manage all payments, as well as the ability to verify accounts and import data.

Kieron James, CEO of Wonderful, only sees the upsides for charities when it comes to open banking. He advised: “We would urge charities to embrace the technology and get on board now, while it’s still fairly nascent.”

Wonderful has two arms: Wonderful Payments (a real-time donation processing service) and Wonderful Organisation (the fundraising platform focused on events). In both cases, donors make payments directly from their bank account to their chosen charity’s account – in full.

Open banking appeals to donors because it can both help reduce friction on payments, and minimise security risks.

Donor and fundraisers enjoy complete confidence that the total amount of cash raised or given will go, in its entirety, to the great cause they support.

Fundraisers prefer fee-free charities

Wonderful has also seen a drive from fundraisers expressing a strong preference to work with charities that don’t use an intermediary with processing fees. They want to see all their money raised to benefit the intended organisation.

On the open banking evolution, James said: “There is real power in the third sector. Charities can help increase confidence and familiarity with open banking because, if their A2A payment is a donation, people may be more inclined to trust a bank-to-charity connection than a bank-to-ecommerce one. It all helps.

“If we can get to point that all UK charities are getting 100% of their donations with easy open banking technology, wouldn’t that be genuinely wonderful?”

Find out more in our ebook, ‘The charities guide to growth through open banking’.

Download our free ebook

Disclaimer: Content is based on a discussion with the Wonderful Organisation and the Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE) to enable Wonderful to provide details relating its service offering for information purposes only. For more information on the use of our website see https://www.openbanking.org.uk/terms-conditions/

If you are a third party provider (TPP) and you would like to share your open banking story with us, please email us at marketing@openbanking.org.uk.