Welcome.Place launches a payment card for refugees in France with Visa

Enfuce, a Finnish fintech, has announced the launch of a pilot project with the charity neo-bank Welcome.Place. The aim is to distribute prepaid payment cards to refugees arriving in France, particularly from Ukraine, as part of the Welcome pack offered by the startup. A first in France for "first aid" cards.

FACTS

• Welcome.Place was created in 2022 as a community neo-bank to provide simple, comprehensive and easily accessible financial solutions to all newcomers to help them survive from their first days on French soil.

• NGOs can offer their community banking and financial solutions to newcomers thanks to the infrastructure of Welcome.Place and its partners.

• As part of a welcome kit for newcomers to France, refugees receive a preloaded prepaid Visa card to facilitate the purchase of various products and services during their first weeks in the country.

• Enfuce and its partner Epassi facilitate the issuance and physical distribution of the cards. Enfuce's technology solution also allows for remote and instantaneous definition of spending controls for each card (amount, types of purchases, types of shops, etc.).

CHALLENGES

• Offering a solution to refugees from the Ukrainian war: the pilot project is initially aimed at Ukrainian refugees who have arrived in France since the start of the war in Ukraine in February 2022. According to the UN, approximately 8 million people have fled Ukraine and 120,000 are currently in France registered in official national aid programmes.

• Full-scale implementation beyond this pilot: once the pilot is launched, a larger contract is expected to be awarded in 2023 to expand the card programme to serve more refugees and to integrate more NGOs and commercial partners into the card programme.

• Facilitating and promoting the social and economic inclusion of newcomers to Europe: the economic and social inclusion of newcomers and refugees usually takes 5 years. With the help of these partners, Welcome. Place believes it can reduce this integration time to only one year by simplifying access to services and first aid.

MARKET PERSPECTIVE

• Enfuce is one of the largest Finnish FinTechs, founded in 2016. Highly invested in CSR topics, it has been offering My Carbon Action since 2019, a solution that allows bank customers and merchants to find out the carbon footprint associated with their purchases and receive advice on how to improve their ecological footprint.

• Memo Bank has also chosen Enfuce as its card issuing service provider. Through this partnership, Memo Bank can offer its customers Visa Corporate deferred debit cards. At the launch of this partnership, JD Guyot, CEO of Memo, also emphasised the compatibility of the visions and values of the two companies.

• In the emigration segment, WayaPay, a Kenyan FinTech based in the United States, has just launched a neo-bank for African emigrants to the United States. In addition to offering money transfers to Africa, the start-up stands out for its wide range of financial services based entirely on its mobile wallet, which is accessible in Africa and the United States.