Floodlight review: The business account for ecommerce

One of the biggest challenges that can determine a company’s success (or failure!) is how it manages its cash flow. There are a range of online spend management and book keeping platforms that give you an overview of your company’s bank accounts, spending and financial activity. One such platform is Floodlight, which is designed for ecommerce businesses.

What is Floodlight?

Floodlight is a cloud-based money management platform that aims to give you full visibility of your ecommerce business’s cash flow and spending decisions with the minimum of effort. It also allows you to create up to 25 virtual cards to help your business manage spending across a range of accounts and business areas.

How does Floodlight work?

Floodlight has a series of features and functionalities designed to take the stress out of running your business and reduce the time you spend on financial admin tasks.

The platform uses open banking technology to bring all your PayPal, Stripe, Shopify, Google Ads and business bank account transaction data and balances into one dashboard. This also allows you to quickly reconcile your accounts, easily see where your company cash is being spent and receive quick insights into your business’s revenue and spending. This means you can monitor your sales and work out if you are hitting your goals.

Like other cloud-based accounting software or money management systems, you can categorise your company spending into different accounts.

Virtual cards and business accounts

Using Floodlight you can then generate a series of virtual Mastercard debit cards to manage and organise spend out of these different spending pots. Floodlight enables you to generate up to 25 virtual cards, each offering unlimited 1% cashback on your spending.

You can also make payments from within Floodlight to suppliers and transfer money from one account to another using the Faster Payments system. International transactions carry a 0.5% transaction fee. You can use floodlight to make payments in the following currencies: euros, US dollars, Swiss francs, Swedish krona, Norwegian krona, Czech koruna, Romanian leu, Croatian kuna, and Polish zloty.

Is Floodlight suitable for your business?

Floodlight says it is designed for ecommerce founders, and many of the platform’s features are created to serve those needs. This is particularly true of its Shopify and Google Ads account integrations.

Floodlight is available for customers based in the UK and the European Economic Area (EEA) with the exception of Germany, Austria and Malta.

Is Floodlight Safe?

Floodlight is not a licensed bank, but its parent company is registered as an e-money account provider in the UK via the Financial Conduct Authority and in Lithuania through the Bank of Lithuania. This means that, while it doesn’t have the authorisation to hold its customers’ money itself, it keeps its customers money in a separate account at a licensed and regulated bank.

This shouldn’t cause too much concern as, in the event that Floodlight were to become insolvent and stop trading, any customer money would be safe.

Floodlight says that it uses external customer authentication solutions, data encryption, fraud and transaction monitoring software and independent security testing to ensure the safety of all customer funds and accounts.‍

Frequently asked questions

• Is Floodlight a bank?

  No. Floodlight isn’t a regulated bank. It describes itself as a ‘finance tech platform’. This means that, while it doesn’t have the authorisation to hold its customers’ money itself, it keeps its customers money (those opening Floodlight business accounts) in a separate account at a licensed and regulated bank.

• How is Floodlight regulated?

  Floodlight is a tech company with an e-money institution agent authorisation. That means it can offer a range of financial services without being a licensed bank. Its e-money accounts are provided by PayrNet, which is an FCA and Bank of Lithuania licensed e-money intstitution.

• How does Floodlight keep its customers' money and data protected?

  Floodlight says that it uses external customer authentication solutions, data encryption, fraud and transaction monitoring software and independent security testing to ensure the safety of all customer funds and accounts. Its website says that everything its teams have built has been in accordance with GDPR regulations and it only processes the data its need to in order to provide its services.