Key results

• VRP funding grew from around 5% to around 20% of businesses using Apron expense cards between October 2025 and September 2026

• Expense cards top up automatically from the business’s bank account when the balance drops below a set threshold

• No fraud cases reported on VRP payments since launch in September 2025

The challenge: payments admin for UK small businesses

For decades, small business owners across the UK have lost an average of five hours a week to payments admin. Invoices sit unopened, approvals stall, and bookkeepers spend their week chasing down paperwork instead of closing the books.

Apron, the payments platform for small businesses and the people who manage their finances, set out to fix that. Their belief is simple: business payments have fallen years behind consumer payments and there's no good reason a company should have to work harder to pay a supplier than a person does to pay back a friend.

The result? Apron created a single, easy to use, beautifully designed platform that handles the whole life of a payment, from capture to reconciliation. Paying suppliers, running payroll, and managing expenses all happen in one place — so business owners can spend less time on admin and more time growing the business they set out to build.

As Apron set out to expand their cards product, they needed a way to move money directly and reliably from a business's bank account to fund these cards. Apron found that partner in Plaid, whose depth in open banking matched their own depth in understanding SMBs.

How VRP lets businesses fund expense cards without lifting a finger

Recurring Pay by Bank, Plaid's solution for variable recurring payments (VRP), gives businesses a way to collect flexible, recurring payments directly from a customer's bank account. For Apron, that meant a new way to keep expense cards funded: instead of a business owner manually transferring money each time a card ran low or relying on a card top-up, funds move directly from the business's bank account to their Apron wallet automatically, whenever the balance drops below a set threshold.

What followed was a steady shift in how Apron's customers choose to fund their cards. In its early stages, only around 5% of businesses using Apron expense cards funded them this way as most relied on manual transfers or ad-hoc bank funded top ups. In less than a year, that share has climbed to around 20% — a result of the ongoing work Apron and Plaid have done together to optimise the funding journey. That meant digging into how banks handle amount limits, frequency limits, and account-matching rules — insights both teams used to continually refine how consents are created and payments are orchestrated.

That growth has been strong enough that the finance and bookkeeping teams within Apron's customer businesses now treat VRP as the standard way to fund expense cards.

The momentum hasn’t stopped there. Apron has logged zero fraud cases since first implementing VRP in September 2025 — a track record that's helped make VRP not just a convenience, but a trusted default.

Looking ahead

Apron sees plenty of room for VRP to grow further especially as more banks are expected to enable VRP over time, widening the pool of businesses who can use it. Apron is also looking ahead to broader Commercial VRP capabilities, which will unlock a wider and more powerful range of use cases for its customers.

If you're interested in how Plaid's Recurring Pay by Bank can power reliable, recurring payments for your business, get in touch today.