Visa and Natixis Payments announced their collaboration at the Paris Fintech Forum, Europe's largest event for digital finance. The two players presented their platform integrating innovative payment solutions for fintechs.
The Paris Fintech Forum, held from January 29 to 30, 2019, brought together more than 2,600 people, 220 CEOs and 150 startups. Visa and Natixis Payments took the opportunity to announce their partnership and the launch of a complete white-label Payments in a box solution. The aim: to enable fintechs to refocus on their core business.
Simplify the issuing and management of payment instruments
Natixis Payments, the leading issuer of Visa cards in continental Europe through Groupe BPCE, and Visa, the world leader in digital payments, share the same culture of innovation. Both are keen to support fintechs by making it easier to issue and manage payment instruments. The Xpollens solution, currently in the pilot phase, is aimed initially at startups. Spain's Coinscrap and France's Linxo were selected in early 2019 to develop this range of services.
Thanks to Xpollens, the Linxo neobank will be able to issue physical and virtual payment cards, track spending in real time, respond efficiently to customer requests and avoid bank-imposed delays. As a reminder, Linxo is an intelligent financial assistant that gives users an overview of their finances and simplifies money management. The account aggregator offers a free service and a paying service at 29.99 euros per year, including a 12-month extended warranty, overdraft forecasting and unlimited multi-account search in the history.
Xpollens is actually a direct competitor to Treezor, which was acquired by Société Générale in September 2018. By adopting this solution, the French account aggregator is getting a head start on its main competitor, Bankin', which raised €20 million last April to improve its financial coaching service. The offer proposed by Visa and Natixis Payments should enable it, and other fintechs that adopt it, to focus on the customer experience and take advantage of business opportunities resulting from PSD2, a directive that notably allows the sharing of customer banking data.
An integrated solution in 100 days
More concretely, this offer translates into the provision of tools enabling the creation of personalized payment methods, adapted to the Fintech business model and current regulations. Beneficiary startups will be supported by a program manager able to advise them on the best solution to offer their end-customers.
In other words, Natixis Payments and Visa will take care of the entire process of issuing and managing payments, allowing fintechs to work exclusively on their customer journeys and partnerships. The two leaders are proposing to integrate this solution in 100 days, so that as many startups as possible can benefit from it. This speed of implementation to guarantee rapid time-to-market is crucial for fintechs.
There is every reason to believe that this full range of services, from payment card issuing to real-time payment and account management, will enable fintechs to stand out in an already crowded market. It has to be said that the European regulatory framework (DSP2, financial passport) is particularly favorable to the growth of these financial start-ups. The solution developed by Visa and Natixis Payments will be available from summer 2019.