This Thursday, the rules around how much you can pay contactlessly in the UK change permanently. The Financial Conduct Authority is scrapping the fixed £100 contactless limit from March 19, handing banks and payment providers the freedom to set their own caps or let customers set their own. For London’s independent healthcare practitioners, it opens a window that a new app is designed to walk straight through.

WriteUpp, the practice management platform used by more than 50,000 healthcare professionals across the UK and beyond, launched WriteUpp Pay this week. The app allows clinicians to accept contactless card payments, Apple Pay, and Google Pay directly on an iPhone or Android device, with no card reader, terminal, or upfront hardware investment required.

“We have been building toward this for a while,” said Eric Lalonde, CEO of WriteUpp. “The way the UK is moving on contactless limits reflects a broader shift in how people expect to pay for things. Healthcare is one of the last places where that expectation has not been fully met. WriteUpp Pay changes that for our users starting this week.“

How WriteUpp Pay Works

WriteUpp Pay uses NFC technology built into modern smartphones to process in-person payments linked directly to patient appointments and invoices inside the WriteUpp platform. Payments are processed through Stripe, meaning no card or payment data is ever stored by WriteUpp itself. When a session ends, the clinician opens the app, finds the appointment, and the patient taps their card or phone to pay. The invoice is marked as paid automatically. A receipt can be emailed directly from the app.

The app is available on both iOS and Android. WriteUpp says this makes it the only electronic medical record platform offering Tap to Pay across both operating systems. Digital wallets, including Apple Pay and Google Pay, are accepted alongside contactless bank cards. Digital wallet payments carry no upper transaction limit because they use biometric authentication, making them particularly well-suited to higher-value clinical consultations.

For practices operating on tablets or older devices without NFC capability, WriteUpp Pay also supports the Stripe Wisepad3, a compact Bluetooth card reader that connects to the app wirelessly. This means the app works across a wide range of hardware setups without requiring practices to commit to a specific device type.

Why the Timing Matters for London Clinics

Independent healthcare in London operates under specific financial pressures. Clinic rents are high, staffing is competitive, and many solo practitioners carry the full administrative burden of running a Business alongside delivering patient care. Payment collection has historically been one of the more friction-filled parts of that burden.

Visa data shows that Tap to Phone adoption surged by 320 percent in the UK between 2024 and 2025, with more than one in five users being new small businesses. The appetite for phone-based payment acceptance is growing, and the removal of the £100 contactless cap removes one of the last practical barriers to using it for higher value transactions like clinical consultations.

WriteUpp Pay connects to existing WriteUpp accounts rather than requiring a separate onboarding process. Clinicians log in with their usual credentials, link their Stripe account, confirm a location in Stripe, and begin taking payments. There is no new billing system to learn and no additional subscription to manage.

“A lot of our users were already using Stripe through WriteUpp for online payments,” Lalonde said. “WriteUpp Pay extends that into the clinic room. There is no new account to set up, no extra tools to juggle. You open the app, and the patient taps to pay. That is genuinely it.”

What This Means for Patient Experience

The shift to tap-based payments in healthcare is as much about patient experience as it is about clinic efficiency. Patients already use contactless payments for everything from coffee to gym memberships. Arriving at a clinic and being handed a paper invoice to settle later creates unnecessary friction in what should be a straightforward transaction.

WriteUpp Pay enables payments at the point of care, immediately after the appointment. Patients can use the card already in their wallet or the phone already in their hand. The process takes seconds. For clinicians, the benefit is equally direct. Invoices are settled in real time rather than chased over days or weeks, improving cash flow without adding any administrative overhead.

With London’s contactless infrastructure now entering a new phase of flexibility following the FCA’s March 19 changes, WriteUpp Pay arrives at a moment when both patients and practitioners are primed to embrace faster, simpler payment methods inside the clinic room. For the thousands of independent health and wellness professionals operating across the capital, a phone that already sits in their pocket has just become their payment terminal.