FRIDAY IS PAYDAY
THE DAY OF THE WEEK NOBODY IN THIS TRADE TALKS ABOUT
Article by Lee Kerr CEO and co-founder of LynkPay
www.lynkpay.co.uk
Ask any operator what the worst day of the week is and most will say Friday. Not because of the school run traffic or the weekend rush, but because Friday is payday. Someone in the office sits down with a spreadsheet, a bank login and a list of drivers, and starts pressing buttons. Twelve hours later, if nothing has gone wrong, everybody has been paid. If something has gone wrong, the phone starts ringing on Saturday morning.
That job is what LynkPay was built to remove. I’ve been in and around this industry long enough to know that a payments company will not win anyone over with a glossy app. Operators care about two things: does the money land, and can I prove it did. So that’s where we started.
How it works under the bonnet
LynkPay is a regulated payment initiation service provider. In plain English, we move money on open banking and Faster Payments rails, straight between bank accounts. We hold no card data and we hold no client funds. There’s no pot of driver money sitting in our account waiting to be released. When a payout is triggered, it goes from the operator’s bank to the driver’s bank, and it settles in seconds rather than days.
The operator side of that is a single screen. Every driver, every balance, every payment status, and one button. Payouts can be scheduled instantly, daily or weekly, and each one moves through processing, settled and reconciled in real time. Nobody has to ring a driver to ask whether it arrived. The ledger already knows.
On the passenger side, drivers can take fares by bank transfer, by QR code, or by contactless card, Apple Pay and Google Pay, with no extra hardware in the car. Prepaid SMS booking takes the deposit up front and takes the no-show with it. This year we added a Visa card for drivers, issued through the app at no cost to the fleet, with no credit checks and no paperwork for the office.
Today there are around 25,000 drivers on LynkPay across the UK, and the platform has moved more than
20
£300 million. Plenty of people have tried to build payments for this trade. As things stand, we remain the only viable option built for it, and that is a position we intend to keep earning.
Then we started listening to drivers
Somewhere in the second year of doing this, it became obvious that we had built something for operators and drivers were simply the recipients. They got paid faster, which they liked, but we hadn’t really thought about the rest of their week: fuel; insurance; groceries; school shoes. A driver’s income is decent, but the outgoings are relentless, and every penny of it is spent in the same places as everyone else, at full price.
So we built LynkPay Rewards, and it goes live in October.
Driver Discounts opens first. It’s a catalogue of more than three million products, with offers negotiated directly with household brands rather than lifted off a voucher site. Travel, dining, groceries, days out, technology and home. Depending on the merchant, a driver buys a digital card below face value, uses a member code at checkout, or clicks a tracked link and the price simply drops. Every saving is logged against their account, so they can see what it has actually been worth to them.
There’s no new account and no second password. Drivers open Rewards inside the LynkPay app, or sign in through the link on
lynkpay.co.uk from any browser, using the same login they already use to get paid. It’s included in the wallet fee, so there is nothing extra for the driver to pay and nothing for the operator to build. What a driver browses or buys is their business, not their operator’s.
Private hire insurance comparison and a LynkPay fuel card, prepaid or on 30 days’ credit, follow next.
For operators, the pitch is simple. Rewards is a recruitment and retention offer that the firm down the road can’t match, switched on across the whole fleet in an afternoon, with take-up reporting in the client portal.
Faster pay wins drivers. We’ve known that for a while. Helping them keep more of it is the part we should have got to sooner.
OCTOBER 2026 PHTM
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