I'm closing this as Santander have now pulled out of the cycle market.

We've heard a number of rumours that Santander are pulling out of Cycle Finance so we'll be interested to see how this progresses...

We've chased our contact at Santander he has promised us an update next week.

Just echoing other peoples comments here. We've been using V12 for years but Novuna are much cheaper and from the comments here seem to offer good service as well. I'm waiting to hear back from Santander but again, they appear to be a better option. We will definitely be moving away from V12 in the stores in the short term and will need another option integrated online as well.

In terms of Citrus Lime, V12 exclusive is a non-starter in my opinion. It is effectively making the use of Citrus Lime thousands of pounds more expensive than CL's competitors. However I agree with other comments, part of the reason we are in this situation is because V12 have exclusivity, simply changing that exclusivity to Santander will push the problem down the road until Santander realise their monopoly. 2 integrated partners has to be a minimum. I understand that comes with a cost but it's less than integrating a new partner every 2 years. Perhaps the finance providers will see the value in Citrus Lime bringing custom and offer to shoulder the costs of integration?

The Bicycle Association now Recommend Novuna (Hitachi) as a preferred partner. Shopify and other companies integrate with many finance houses. Citrus Lime also integrated with this company until last year. The rates are massively better and the service is excellent. V12 rates are very expensive compared to them. As Michael Jackson once said "Make that change"

Just a quick update for all interested. We asked some technical questions of Santander in late December, we've contacted them today for an update.

We're also going to speak to V12 again and pass this thread to their team. They have started to contact some of our customers for more feedback on our offering following a chat before XMAS. It seems clear to me that if they cannot move on rates we'll need to look to add support for more providers which is a complexity I'd rather avoid as I've explained below.

The key issues which make this complex are :

Deposits - These reduce the cost of finance to our customer base, but need to be taken by the finance provider;

Finance widgets onsite - We need to code these to support blocking finance on sale or low margin items - this makes the development and support more complex;

C&C security at the point of collection - Without the last four digits of the card used to make the deposit being available in the POS so the retailer can confirm that the person making the pickup has this card physically the fraud risk for our customers is significant.

Ongoing testing resource on each release. We have yet to work with a provider which has an automated integration test platform so that is a lot of manual labour;

Ongoing support training and thus costs.

Overall this is going thru the gears in terms of development, support and commercials, there are three us of here working to move this forwards.

Having just come off a pretty frustrating Teams call with V12, it's pretty clear that they know they have the upper hand over retailers and are unapologetic for their rates.

The lack of options available to integrate with for web sales and the number of cycle retailers on board as a result of them being the ACT's preferred partner has certainly contributed to this.

If there is no viable option for retailers to switch then there is no need for them to have to compete on rates.

With most contracts naming them as a primary lender, offering an alternative lender in store isn't an option either.

I'll certainly be keeping tabs on this thread going forward. Fingers crossed for some progress with either Novuna or Santander.

We need Novuna as the rates are better and the service is excellent

We also use Santander. I think anyone with half an eye on profit uses Santander or Hitachi as the rates are way better than V12.