A hairdressing salon owner takes a card payment at the counter, adds a tip for the stylist who did the colour, and, when January turns out to be a slow month, borrows against next month’s revenue. And all of it happens in the same software where the appointment was booked.
In this episode of the Embedded Finance Review podcast, we dive into the world of beauty, or software for beauty salons, to be precise. Phorest is the Irish software that hair and beauty salons, med spas, and aesthetics clinics use to run their business, from Dublin to North America.
Patrick O’Donnell, Global Commercial Director Payments at Phorest, joined me to share how the company got into payments 15 years after founding, how they decided to get into lending and what other financial products come next.
Key Takeaways:
- Why the software and the customer trust have to come first, and what goes wrong when financial products arrive before
- How payments landed at Phorest through a US partner rather than a roadmap decision, and what had to be hired in afterwards
- Why around 70 per cent of payment activity is card present, and why the terminal experience carries the whole product
- How Patrick’s financial services team works with product and engineering to decide what products actually get built
- Why customers rarely ask for financial products, and how a test cohort decides instead
- What salon owners use embedded capital for, from the January slowdown to new machinery and new branches
- Why buy now, pay later stays switched off until the customer turns it on, and where it lands hardest in aesthetics
- What share of revenue financial services could reach, and why Patrick will not call it the goal
- Why embedded payroll starts in the US and Canada, and what booking, employee, timestamp and holiday data makes possible