eyworks and Unipaas have launched eypay, an embedded payments product built into the eyworks early years platform. eyworks is the UK software used by nearly 2,000 childcare settings to run the daily business of a nursery, from registers and ratios to invoicing and parent communication. eypay sits inside that platform and takes a nursery from invoice to collection to reconciliation in one place, with support for cards, wallets, direct debit, digital bank transfer, and Tax-Free Childcare. Unipaas is the FCA-authorised embedded payments provider behind it, running it white-label so the experience stays inside eyworks.
The mechanics here are familiar from other vertical SaaS payments deals. Unipaas provides the licensed rails and the reconciliation logic, eyworks keeps the customer relationship and the interface, and the separate payment tools a nursery used to juggle start to disappear. Most settings today stitch together a card terminal, a direct debit provider, a bank account for transfers, and a manual process for government schemes, then try to line it all up against their invoices at the end of the month. eypay folds that into one flow. So far, so standard for embedded payments. The question is whether nursery payments are really just generic SaaS payments with a childcare logo on top, or whether this vertical has something horizontal processors cannot easily copy. The answer sits in one of those five payment methods.
The Tax-Free Childcare problem
Tax-Free Childcare is a government top-up scheme. Parents pay into a dedicated childcare account, the government adds two pounds for every eight they pay in, and the balance is sent on to the nursery. Simple enough for parents but genuinely painful for providers. The money arrives in the nursery's bank account from a government source, and at one point, it landed with no parent name attached, referenced only as "National Savings," which providers publicly called an administrative impossibility. Matching each payment to the right child and invoice is manual and slow, and it is precisely the kind of admin a nursery manager has no time for. A generic card processor cannot solve this. A payments layer built for childcare, where TFC sits in the same ledger as the card and direct debit payments and reconciles automatically, takes that work off the desk. From what I understand, that is the real product.
From accounting to early years
We wrote earlier this year about how Unipaas had quietly built depth in UK accounting software, signing Capium, IRIS Pay, Nomi Pay, and then Bright (EFR). eyworks and its competitor, Tapestry, just six days later, both signed with Unipaas. It looks like the same playbook is being applied to a second vertical. It seems the common thread is a sector-specific reconciliation problem that is annoying enough that a platform would rather buy the fix than build it. Messy invoice matching in accounting, Tax-Free Childcare in early years. For a nursery weighing this up, card acceptance is the easy part and available from anyone. The real decision is whether the scheme-specific plumbing is worth owning, and very few will decide it is. Whether that stays a defensible edge is something I will watch.
