Payment insight February 2022

Headlines

Acquiring – Soft POS gains ground

• UNITED STATES - Apple officialise son service Tap to Pay sur iPhone
• FRANCE - Mobile payment is also entitled to a French application
• FRANCE - Market Pay adds link payment to its Soft Pos solution

The announcement which marked this month, it is that of Apple which reveals a new brick of its strategy of deployment in the financial services. Here with its mobile payment acceptance service directly from the iphone called Tap to Pay. This new strategy materializes Apple's strategy around the Apple Wallet, which will soon be able to support the ID card and the license of American citizens or the navigo pass in France. One of the notable differences is that this time Apple has decided to play the open card. Whereas the Apple brand could have created a proprietary system that would have disqualified the players in the payment industry, it is turning to partnerships such as Stripe to achieve acceptance. This new perspective is likely to give Soft POS technology a new lease of life by opening up access to the iOS world. Market Pay, which with Paywish, had taken a certain lead, is now enriching its solution with payment links and will integrate new services such as refunds, deposit taking and is considering an enrichment with a BNPL solution. For its part, Lyra, the Toulouse-based start-up specializing in mobile payment, has announced the launch of Payzen, an application that allows payment links to be shared via email, QR Code, url, SMS or social networks and accepts more than 150 payment methods.

A2A Payments – Safer, cheaper

• INTERNATIONAL - GoCardless joins the Unicorns
• UNITED KINGDOM - Bank of America and Banked launch "Pay by Bank
• UNITED KINGDOM - TSB simplifies payment for SMBs

Along with payment links, account-to-account payments are the other major innovation in payments. Indeed, even though transfers have existed for a long time, the simplification brought about by open banking and the fluidity of the processes offered by FinTech players make them a credible and less expensive alternative to card payments. The gradual arrival of this new trend has established players such as GoCardless, which has made it its core business with the automation of recurring payments. GoCardless, which, thanks to a new $300m round of financing from Permira and BlackRock, has reached a valuation of $2.1bn. GoCardless has launched Instant Bank Pay, a new way to collect one-off payments from bank to bank using open banking. Klarna recently chose GoCardless to offer bank account payments to its 21 million customers in the US. GoCardless also signed a strategic agreement with Paypal, that will allow GoCardless to become a partner in managing direct debits. Bank of America will rely on startup Banked to offer its "Pay by Bank" service in the UK, and TSB has launched a new app called Revenu, designed to help SMEs receive payments faster and manage their business finances. The banking technology, developed by BankiFi, allows TSB's business customers to collect payments from consumers from requests sent via SMS, WhatsApp, email and QR codes.