PayPoint is asking retailers to “hold it to account” on a new series of pledges to the independent convenience channel.

As part of its strategy to improve its relationship with the retail community, PayPoint has promised to develop its service and communication, continue to bring innovation to the market and champion the challenges stores face with a retailer pledge.

“We all know how tricky a year it’s been,” PayPoint founder Tim Watkin-Rees told Retail Express.

In future, when people look at us, they’ll be able to judge whether or not we are holding up to our commitments

“We botched the way it was handled at the time and got an awful lot of well-deserved criticism. We didn’t do a good job of dealing with retailers and explaining why we were doing things.”

He said they were launching the retailer pledge to “get firmly back in the right place”. “I’m not saying that we’re there, I’m saying we’re trying to find a commitment we can make that we can aspire to, move forward and improve all the time. 

“In future, when people look at us, they’ll be able to judge whether or not we are holding up to our commitments.”

Watkin-Rees comments came just weeks after PayPoint’s chief executive Dominic Taylor told Retail Express the company wanted to be the “voice of the independent sector”.

The retailer pledge comes ahead of the launch of a fully-integrated EPoS solution, PayPoint One, which will be made available to all retailers at the end of September.