CB relies on STET to deploy its “Click to Pay” offer

Groupement Cartes Bancaires (GIE CB) is preparing its counter-offensive against Visa and MasterCard to roll out its own “Click to Pay” offering in France. The aim is to provide banks with a solution to accelerate the digitization of their payments, via CB's tokenization platform. This deployment also represents a pledge of sovereignty.

FACTS

• Click to Pay is a payment method designed to simplify the online payment process for card payments (without having to manually enter card information, and by converting sensitive data into non-sensitive tokens thanks to tokenization).
• By 2026, Groupement Cartes Bancaires (GIE CB) will also be offering its own solution, simply called “Click to Pay”. The service will be available to customers of all CB network member banks.
• STET is a partner of Groupement Cartes Bancaires (GIE CB) to facilitate the deployment of this offer. Under this partnership, CB network member banks will be able to route payment flows from e-wallets such as Apple Pay via the CB tokenization platform, operated by STET, by the first half of 2025.

CHALLENGES

• Guaranteeing payment sovereignty: The positioning of the GIE CB represents a means for the French payment network to offer in-house technology to French banks, and thus respond to the deployment of the American schemes Visa and MasterCard.
• Countering the decline in transactions: According to the Yavin index, the downward trend in Cartes Bancaires (CB) market share was confirmed in the first quarter of 2023. In fact, CB transactions fell significantly, accounting for just 75% of all payments made with French cards (compared with 90% in December 2021). American schemes, on the other hand, are doing well. In March 2023, Visa had a market share of 17% of payments made with French cards (compared with 8% for Mastercard).

MARKET PERSPECTIVE

• MasterCard and Visa have positioned themselves as the world leaders in tokenized payments and Click to Pay, with a host of new initiatives.
• But the Cartes Bancaires (CB) economic grouping is reacting today, setting out a timetable for the deployment of its own Click to Pay solution.
• It is also constantly working to renew its offerings. In 2023, for example, Adyen and GIE CB are launching an innovative solution for automatically updating bank details.