Bancomat Enters Instant Payment Market with SIA

The Italian card scheme announces an agreement with the European processor SIA on integrating Jiffy, their real-time credit transfer service, for their m-payment app Bancomat Pay.

Roughly 37 million PagoBancomat cardholders, managed by the banking consortium Bancomat, will be able to conduct real-time P2P transfers, online and in-store payments, using the recipients’ mobile phone number. To this end, Bancomat launched a mobile app called “Bancomat Pay”.

This app will be linked to the users’ banks, enabling them to send and receive money, as well as pay for their purchases without pulling out their payment card or entering their PIN code.

Additional services are scheduled to launch this fall. Besides PagoBancomat cardholders, this service will also be made available to Jiffy‘s five million users, in more than 2,000 stores, and via the IT platform PagoPA, for paying taxes and fines online.

Comments – Real-time payment becoming mainstream

Through their partnership with a local debit card scheme, this processor will be aiming for 37 million users. They now have over 5 million users, and they became a leading player on the Instant Payment market. They keep focusing on improving their leadership in P2P payment services, in the Eurozone. For now, Swish is the number one industry player with more than half of the Swedish population, and the British service Paym reported 3.7 million users in 2017.

Instant credit has several advantages for many market players (including consumers and merchants). Several banking industry giants, such as Bancomat, are trying to implement this feature for faster, and streamlined financial service/exchanges. If these use cases keep spreading, they could impact Visa and Mastercard share in the payment sector. This partnership aims at helping banks stay in charge of credit transfer-based transactions, however, it can lead to reducing card use levels.