About us
Getting paid shouldn’t be the hardest part of the job.
Vcents is built by Over the Eem Services Limited, in London, for the millions of people in the UK who run a business on their own — and who already do most of that running inside a chat thread.
The problem we started with
A sole trader books the work in WhatsApp, agrees the price in WhatsApp, and confirms the date in WhatsApp. Then, at the one moment that actually matters commercially, everything stops. The customer is sent somewhere else: an email, a card form, or a message containing a sort code and an account number to be typed out by hand.
That handover is where payments go quiet. Not because anyone refuses to pay, but because paying suddenly takes six steps instead of one, and people get interrupted at step four.
What we’re trying to solve
We think the last step should be as easy as the first four. So Vcents lives in the chat the work was agreed in. You ask for money in plain English; your customer taps a link and authorises the payment inside their own banking app; the receipt arrives back in the same thread, where both of you can see it.
Underneath, payments are processed by Stripe, and your customer can pay straight from their bank account rather than entering a card. Cards still work if that is what they have to hand. Our fee is 2% + 20p per transaction, published here rather than buried in a contract, and the money settles into your own bank account. We are working towards moving collection onto UK Open Banking directly, which is priced closer to the cost of moving the money. We will say so here when it happens rather than describing it before it is true.
How we think about money
- Your money goes to you. Payments settle into the merchant’s own bank account. We are not trying to become a place your balance sits.
- Your customer authorises in their own bank. We never ask for card numbers or banking credentials, and never see them.
- Confirm before committing. Anything that moves money shows you the amount, the name and the number, and then waits to be told to go.
- Leave a record. Every payment produces a receipt both sides can point at afterwards.
Where we are
Vcents is UK-only and GBP-only, deliberately. Payments are a regulated business and the rails, the rules and the customer expectations differ in every market. We would rather do one country properly.
Want to see it work?
The landing page has a real conversation, recorded on a real phone, from “request 10 from Anna” to the receipt landing back in the chat.
Watch the thread