News in Brief – July 2019
Players’ strategy
- UNITED KINGDOM – Yolt expands the ongoing test phase for their payment initiation service. They now aim for Nationwide, Santander and Barclays customers in the UK, as well. Yolt Pay Beta started being tested 6 months ago in partnership with six institutions (Lloyds, Bank of Scotland, Halifax, RBS, NatWest and Ulster Bank).
- EUROPE – Qonto now aims for Europe (starting in Italy, Spain and Germany). This French challenger bank opted for a BtoB approach and addresses SMEs’ needs. They intend to attract 40,000 companies within 2 years on these new markets.
- EUROPE – Treezor (Société Générale) keeps making progress in France and in Europe, and relies on a partnership with Mastercard. Treezor stands out as a Bank-as-a-Service specialist; they already issued more than 500,000 cards and processed over €5 billion. Their customers are, for instance, able to operate banking services and issue means of payment. Treezor will also distribute the Mastercard Payment Transaction Services (MPTS) processing platform. An opportunity for the card scheme to build bridges with another FinTech and process additional payment flows.
- INTERNATIONAL – Visa acquires Payworks (provider of next-generation payment gateway software for the Point of Sale), strengthening their position on the omni-channel payment market. Goal: allow for Cloud-based processing of in-store and online transactions. Visa would be planning to include Payworks’ payment gateway in their CyberSource management platform to provide merchants and acquirers with a fully integrated acceptance solution.
Credit Transfer, Direct Debit & Instant Payment
- FRANCE – Société Générale claims two million instant credit transfers since the beginning of 2019. This option is charged €0.80 (excl. VAT) per transaction to individual and business customers, and €0.60 (excl. VAT) for companies.
- FRANCE – ITALIE – BELGIUM – BNP Paribas reports 2 million instant credit transfers processed (€3.6 billion) through their brands BNP Paribas, Hello Bank! as well as via “Paylib entre amis”.
POS Checkout
- CHINA – By way of meeting some customers’ expectations, Alibaba is adding filters to their face recognition solution. The point would be to appeal more to customers since their picture is displayed on-screen at checkout.
e-Commerce & e-Payment
- INTERNATIONAL – Google Pay includes a rival solution, PayPal, enabling e-merchants to pair PayPal and Google Pay. They may then diversify their payment options for end-users. For now, this option only covers 24 markets.
- UNITED STATES – Tinder bypasses Google Play for in-app purchases, and avoids being charged transaction fees by the Web giant. Instead, they go for a default payment option, prompting the users to key in their card information in-app. Other service providers could later on make this decision…
Fraud Prevention & Security
- UNITED KINGDOM – The FCA chooses to comply with the EBA’s recommendations and agrees to delay the enforcement of Strong Customer Authentication rules planned by the PSD 2. They deem that much remains to be done for this deadline to be met and industry players’ concerns must still be addressed.
Mobile Services
- UNITED KINGDOM – Revolut adds a donation system to their services: their users may choose to round up their card payments and send money to charity. They are also introducing a recurring transfer solution to this same end. This option comes in addition to the existing savings tool Vault.