Barclaycard Payments exist to help British enterprises take and make payments.

But while the brand is well established, new players constantly entering the market constituted a real threat. Fintechs and techy start-ups were bombarding business owners with the promise of the latest, the fastest, the shiniest payment solution.

We had to establish our leadership more boldly.

To do so, we needed to find a way to talk about payments differently.

One that would speak to the real challenges and ambitions of business owners.

One that would allow us to show them all that Barclaycard has to offer to them.

Ultimately, one that could make Barclaycard undeniably synonymous with payments.

Writing for financial services is usually an attempt to appear warm and approachable without boring viewers to death. Ironically, the harder banks try to sound authentic, the less they do. So we decided to amuse small business owners by writing conventional testimonials which end with a smug line about how everything’s resolved. But just as we wind up, we’re interrupted by someone who takes the conversation away from the world of advertising and down a very different avenue. Viewers wonder where all this is going, until a moment in the dialogue snaps the protagonist back into ‘ad mode’ and they turn back to camera, without skipping a beat, to tell us how there’s even more Barclaycard can do for their business. And the final line explains the reason -the payment part is just the start.

Business owners are incredibly innovative and over the past two years they have proved their ability to adapt and transform.

But when we asked them what they considered a source of business transformation, only 7% of them picked “payments”. Actually, 37% of them thought that the primary function of payments was simply to carry out transactions.

But this was no surprise. All the category had shown them was cards being tapped on a POS or money getting in and out of the till. Discounting all the other things that payments could do for their business like help them manage their stock better, improve cash flow and even protect customers from fraud.

With so much overlooked potential, we wanted to show business owners that there is more to payments than just paying and getting paid and dramatise how payments can help them not only manage transactions, but transform their businesses.

The work went live in March 2022 on TV and Social across the UK.

We also had supporting executions for Press, OOH and digital.

As the campaign is only recently launched it is too early to give any definitive response on results. However, early anecdotal evidence, alongside plenty of great press, suggests that this campaign will continue to build on our historical success and further build brand awareness and consideration maintaining the brand’s high ranking in the payment category.