Banking-as-a-Service: Natixis Payments Teams Up With Visa, Launches Xpollens
FACTS
- At the Money 20/20 Europe event in Amsterdam (June 3rd to 5th), the US card scheme Visa and BPCE subsidiary introduced Xpollens: a white label Payments in a box offer.
- Goals: remove the complexity of issuing and managing payments methods, enable corporate clients to focus on their core business and customer experience.
- Clients: merchants, FinTechs and corporates.
- This offer includes a full range of modules, from card issuing to instant payments, and account maintenance.
- How it works. Users rely on APIs to integrate customised solutions allowing them to feature various services for their customers: checking accounts, mobile payments, plastic and virtual cards, payment notifications in real time, instant payments, etc.
- Besides the technical means required to handle issuing aspects, Xpollens also deals with regulatory issues, including EMI applications.
- This solution is currently tested and would initially be meant for FinTechs. It already claims two clients:
- Coinscrap: Spanish savings FinTech focusing on rounding-up spare change,
- Linxo: French account aggregation specialist, also to become Xpollens EMI agent. Linxo will be launching their offer after Xpollens deploys their solution, i.e.: within 100 days.
CHALLENGES
- A vector for securing customer loyalty. The implementation of PSD2 brings along multiple business opportunities, including enabling FinTechs to design services that used to be long-standing players’ prerogative. Yet, carrying out these developments remains a challenge, especially from a regulatory standpoint. Xpollens intends to remedy this situation, providing them with the licences and infrastructure the need to win new customers.
- Heading for co-creation. In order to meet anticipated market evolution at a pan-European level, Natixis Payments bets on a co-innovation approach. They rely on Visa’s expertise to quickly build a customised solution for each project. By way of assisting new players through their transformation processes, other banking groups opted for relatively similar concepts: La Banque Postale with eZyness and Société Générale when they bought out Treezor, for instance.
- Lastly, these moves also highlight traditional players’ intent to get back hold of a business which seemed to be slipping out of their control, and make the most of PSD2-entailed opportunities to achieve this goal.
MARKET PERSPECTIVE
- Linxo announces more initiatives to become an entry point allowing their users to handle banking operations. This FinTech with 2.5 million users already features transaction tracking and payment initiation services. They will be adding a checking account along with companion payment card. A European launch would be considered as well as international accounts: more ways for Linxo to outrun their direct rival, Bankin’.
- Just like Linxo with Xpollens, Lydia relied on Treezor to become an EMI agent and improve the market position as a meta-bank account.