About pennies_

Pennies’ digital charity box extension integrates into checkout processes, providing users with the ability to add a small charity donation via a transaction.
Donations are automatically reported to Pennies, and sent to the merchant’s chosen charity. Automated reconciliation reporting allows for a simple settlement process, ensuring that donations reach the nominated charity quickly.
100 million donations have now been made using the digital charity box, and to date, Pennies has raised £25m in much-needed additional income for over 600 charities in the UK, and in the Republic of Ireland

why pennies chose wirebox_

Pennies have been working with Wirebox for over seven years. Wirebox first supported the Pennies API, and the partnership has grown along with Pennies’ reach ever since.

As Pennies have grown in size adding more retailers on a monthly basis.

With each retailer and the speed of technological change, requires Pennies to support more devices.

The API Wirebox support can work with any system but needs to be configured and Pennies have pre-built systems like for Salesforce commerce and Magento.

Pennies had a Verifone PED app but had been asked to develop an application for Verfione’s new generation of PEDs, the Trinity app will provide businesses that utilise Verifone to make use of the Pennies offering as long as they are a Pennies merchant.

Our Approach_

Wirebox have been a longterm technology and development partner for Pennies and worked along side with Verifone to develop the Pennies app.

Verifone’s Trinity platform uses a new framework that our app development team has received training on.

Requirements for the app had been broken down within the brief provided by Pennies and include information on how the app should behave, the look and feel, as well as making use of all of the PED features (e.g. green / red buttons if applicable).

What we did_

1. Conducted workshops with Pennies and Verifone to understand all stakeholders requirements and limitations
2. Created documentation on all changes required for the new app to be developed.
3. Wireframed and designed the new app on the new PED devices
4. Documented changes which were needed on the API for the PED devices to work.
5. Development a plan to develop the verifone PED device

New API changes

New fields – New fields required in the API for data storage between the API and PEDs including A “Charity Proposition” ID field will
also be added to the charity and included in the existing reporting call and calculation API responses.

A new call will be added for incoming data to a PED, which will save data within the new PED database table. An admin-only PED reporting call will also be added to return a CSV with all PED data collected from the new PED database table, filtered by date range, MID & PID totals

Outcome_

The Verifone Trinity platform was still in being rollout across their network. A major retailer was upgrading their payment terminals to the new platform and why the Pennies app had to be upgraded to work on this platform.

The Wirebox team had to work closely with the Verifone team to develop and test the app. With any new platform there will always be issues and bugs. Wirebox helped identify them and get fixes deployed.

The deadlines to get the app ready were tight, it meant the team including Andy, Tom and Ryan had to work long hours and days to get the app developed and fixed.

The Pennies team were highly grateful for the teams efforts to get the app ready to help get donations for even more charities.

For Ryans submission

The deadlines to get the app ready were tight and the team had to work after hours and weekends in some cases.

Ryan in particular was managing the project making sure everything was being communicated to all the parties. He made himself available at all times, to help resolve any issues. Pennies was extremely grateful to Ryan for all his time and efforts in this project.