Wirebox was started in 2011, and as one of the founders of Wirebox, I’m delighted we’ve been able to support several charities since our inception. And one of our deepest-rooted clients is Pennies.
Pennies has grown from a small “digital charity-box” pilot programme into the UK’s leading fintech charity for micro-donations, rolling out widely across retail and payments, partnering with major merchants and payments providers, and helping raise tens of millions for charities.
Wirebox has been working with Pennies since 2015, helping them unlock technology to enable more and smoother microdonations. Pennies first development was an Application Programming Interface (API), this API allowed merchants like Dominos to allow their customers to donate money from their purchases.
At Wirebox one of our values is to give something back and we support many charities and individuals, as a result. We were asked to support Pennies’ API and be available for all updates and fixes. We were happy to take this on and continue to do to important tasks like:
- Supporting multi-currency reports.
- Adding increased security to calls in the API
- Improving redundancy and speed with Amazon’s Relational Database Service
- Automation of their AWS Server Restructure
- Monitoring CPU, response time and API calls to prevent service issues
Growth
The Pennies concept was simple, you just give a few pennies every time you shop. But something so simple has grown tremendously and Pennies wanted to work with retailers to make it a simpler process; unlocking the potential for thousands of customers to donate every day. Year on year Pennies would develop the technology with our team and more retailers loved the idea and signed up.
At Wirebox, we also focused on helping them get more structure in place. They expanded work with payments and EPOS partners so the donation prompt could appear on a wider range of card terminals and in e-commerce checkouts. And we were involved in the talks with those EPOS partners and helped in the implementation of the newly-supported API.
From 2022, as the use of card and contactless payments rose as a result of the pandemic, Pennies was even more visible with more merchants and more in-app/online integrations. So, by late 2024 public reporting said Pennies had enabled over 230 million micro-donations and helped raise over £55 million for more than 1,000 charities. This is despite a cost of living crisis in full swing and a country reeling from shutdowns and medical emergencies.
Partnership
Every year, Pennies holds an event for its partners and retailers. It is a celebration of the year, looking to the future, and has recently been a time to award some of the heroes who work with Pennies. We love the events; it is a chance to reflect on the amazing job everyone involved does. Here’s Ryan and me, suited and booted, in attendance:
In 2024, some of our team members were even fortunate to receive an award for their work with Pennies:
That’s Ryan and Tom with the CEO, Alison.
We launched a lot for Pennies in 2024, including their Vertifone app, API updates; it was a busy year! But to be appreciated, and for such a great cause, means so much to all of us. Unsurprisingly, we’re looking forward to the next event in November and to another 10 years supporting the incredible mission of Pennies. And we’re honoured that you have such amazing things to say about us too:
what does Pennies say about our work?
