For driving instructor software
Your diary marks lessons paid. It can take the payment too.
Synapto is the embedded payments partner for UK driving instructor software. Instructors are still chasing bank transfers, taking cash at the kerb and ticking a box in your app afterwards. Your product runs the whole business and sits outside the only part that moves money.
How the money moves
The lesson payments your diary already tracks. Each stop is a lesson or block your instructors are paid for today, through whatever provider each instructor set up alone. We move lesson money onto payments inside your product: each instructor is settled in full, and your margin is paid monthly.
Payment tracking is not payment.
Almost every product in this trade has a paid or unpaid flag. Some go further and bolt on a checkout the instructor connected themselves. Very few actually take the money, and none of them earn on it.
Meanwhile the instructor is running the worst version of collections. A bank transfer that may or may not arrive. Cash in the glovebox. A ten-hour block sold at a discount, paid in instalments nobody is tracking, expiring in three months whether it is used or not. And the one that actually costs them: a cancellation inside forty-eight hours, which every set of terms in the trade says is chargeable in full, and which almost no instructor ever charges for, because the money was never taken in the first place.
The rails
Tap to Pay on the instructor’s phone
An instructor is a one-person business in a car. They will not buy a terminal, and they should not have to. Tap to Pay turns the phone they already own into a contactless card machine, so a pupil can pay at the end of the lesson on the spot, and your app records it because your app took it.
Block bookings can go on a card up front or be collected by Direct Debit monthly, which for a weekly pupil is cheaper and far more reliable than a standing order they forget to cancel or increase.
- Tap to Pay on the instructor's own phone, no hardware
- Card held against the booking, so a late cancellation can actually be charged
- Blocks paid up front and drawn down by the hour, not chased
- Direct Debit for weekly pupils, on UK rails
- Card details refreshed automatically when a card expires
The commercials
What lesson payments can earn your platform
Most of your instructors already take payment for lessons and blocks, each through a provider they set up on their own. We move them onto payments inside your diary, in your name and in planned groups of instructors, and build the lesson, block and Tap to Pay products that keep them there. Each instructor is settled in full for every lesson, and you receive your margin once a month.
Individually an instructor is a modest merchant. Collectively a national base of them is a serious flow of card volume, and the economics of a payments layer work on the total rather than the individual. That is why this is a revenue line for you and not a favour to your users.
- Your own subscription revenue on agreed terms
- A share of the lesson and block volume your product creates
- Franchise fees collected by Direct Debit, if your schools charge them
- Revenue that grows as your instructor base grows
- Pricing agreed to the total, not each instructor's own small volume
- Commercials in writing before you build anything
The weight
Onboarding sole traders, done by us
Boarding a self-employed instructor with no company number, no website and no filed accounts is where most platform payment projects quietly stall. We do that work, including the checks, and we do it at onboarding so nothing surfaces three months later with a learner's money in it.
When something goes wrong, the instructor rings a named person here. Not a queue, and not your support team.
- Sole traders boarded properly, by us
- Checks done thoroughly at onboarding
- An account manager your instructors can phone
- Disputes and refunds handled here
From first call to first revenue
Book a payments review
Bring your instructor count and a typical lesson price. We show you what the flow is worth, in writing.
Scope the integration
Tap to Pay and pay by link first, because they are the fastest route to instructors actually using it.
Board your instructors
Sole traders onboarded by us, in a flow built for people with no finance department.
Earn every lesson
A revenue line that moves with your base, and an account manager looking after both of you.
Questions
Some will not, and that is fine. The ones who will are the ones already losing an evening a week chasing transfers, and the pupils who never carry cash. It does not have to be all of them to be worth building.
No. It runs on a suitable modern phone with no reader and nothing to charge, which is the whole point for someone whose office is a car.
The instructor. Each one holds their own merchant agreement and their money settles to their own account. We never hold their money and neither does your platform, which keeps your regulatory position exactly where it is today.
Refunds run from the same record in your product, and the instructor can do it themselves without ringing anyone. If a pupil disputes a charge instead, that comes to us, not to you.
A thirty-minute payments review
Bring your instructor count and a typical lesson price. We will tell you what moving your instructors is worth and whether we are the right fit, including if we are not.