CollectPlus service boosts PayPoint profits

Rising transactions and the growth of click & collect helped boost PayPoint’s pre-tax profits 11.5% to £46m for the year ending 31 March.

The payment provider’s total sales grew 1.7% to £212.2m, helped by continued strong growth in the UK and Ireland, where sales were up 6%.

The group said it saw record transaction volume over the year across retail, mobile and online.

CEO Dominic Taylor said the performance of click & collect had been “particularly encouraging”. The company’s CollectPlus service, which allows customers to send parcels to a local shop for collection, turned a profit for the first time during the year, with transactions up 76.4% to 13.6 million. The company said it would continue to invest in CollectPlus with the “ultimate goal to provide a larger parcel network than the Post Office”.

Earlier this month, PayPoint said CollectPlus would expand its network by a third over the next 12 months.

“PayPoint has continued to deliver earnings growth, in another busy year, in which our businesses have made good progress,” said CEO Dominic Taylor.

“Retail payments and services (UK, Ireland, Romania) and CollectPlus have grown and strengthened their positions in their markets,” he said, adding that the group had combined PayByPhone, PayPoint.net and the recently acquired cashless parking payment provider Adaptis to reinforce the company’s “multichannel payment capability”.

He added the market for mobile top-ups had continued to decline, though this trend had been bucked in Romania.

In order to create a “single proposition with a new modern identity”, the group had also launched the rebranding of the company on 20 May with a new logo. This was intended to make the brand “more modern and effective for the multichannel payment solution that now sits at the heart of PayPoint’s offer”, according to Taylor.

The group added that chairman David Newlands would retire in July after 16 years with the company. He will be replaced by Warren Tucker, who is non-executive director of Reckitt Benckiser and Thomas Cook.