At the beginning of December, we were happy to meet live with the largest eCommerce community in Romania through the partnership with GPeC - Comunitatea GPeC.
In this framework, Alice Anghelea (Revenue Growth, Smart Fintech) had an exciting and valuable one-hour discussion with Andrei Radu (the founder of the Community), in which she clarified several aspects related to account-to-account payments offered through the system # openbanking, how they could be implemented and what benefits they bring to online stores, how they help consumers, but also what is involved in choosing a payment initiation service, complemented by an account inquiry service in terms of automating and facilitating online transactions for eCommerce.
We invite you to follow a summary of the discussion on the blog page of GPeC Romania:
Open banking is an initiative of the European Commission (a regulated environment) that aims to facilitate online payments and make them safer (improves consumer protection when paying online and stimulates competition and innovation)
Open banking provides a better payment experience for users – online payment initiation directly from the consumer's bank account to the merchant's bank account. No card, no payment processors to broker the process.
Payments made through open banking are generally charged to the payer, but things are constantly changing in this area (but the charge only appears on transactions between different banks)
When initiating the payment - open banking facilitates the use of online banking services by listing all the banks covered by the payment solution from which the customer, at check-out, chooses the bank with which he has an account & initiates the payment directly from the online store, and authorizes it in the bank sa where it is automatically transported along with all the payment details – increasing the speed of the payment operation
Open banking boosts cardless payment, especially among customers who are skeptical about exposing their card details online
From the moment the payment is authorized in Open banking, the supplier sends the payment status to the merchant instantly - so there are no delays in collection or the preparation and delivery of the order
Open Banking also offers the possibility of information on the status of accounts in the merchant's platform - it centralizes all the platforms of the banks where the merchant has accounts (without the need to log in to each online banking platform of each bank)
Open banking solutions will also end up being implemented in e-commerce SAAS platforms
For the integration of open banking in online stores, either plug-ins or APIs can be used - so that it is easy to use regardless of the size of the store or without it, depending on the existence of a technical team
Related to the availability of the banks' APIs, the implementation team developed a mechanism for monitoring the performance of the API services offered by Romanian banks: SmartPG (Payment Gateway) Monitor, which is currently also used by the BNR
Merchants will have lower costs if they implement open banking vs. online card payment
Smart Fintech offers 2 payment options – pay as you go (for merchants who have seasonal transactions, they are not constant) or subscription (where the fee does not depend on the value of the transactions but only on the volume)
Through PSD2 (electronic payments directive), any bank that has online banking services is obliged to enter the open banking system
Smart Fintech covers the 12 largest banks in Romania, the connection to the banks being made through APIs based on an IBM platform (ApiConnect)
for more details, access the full article on the GPeC page
Comments