Last week, Visa, along with Global Processing Services, Pannovate, Cornercard, Modulr, AllPay, Meawallet, and W2 Global announced the launch of described as a financial innovation platform that seeks to enable banks and consumer-facing businesses to rapidly deploy a range of innovative fintech payment services.
Businesses wanting to launch a payments program can use b.yond to access a financial technology platform of payment solutions using Visa’s rails, which they can deploy for customers as quickly as one or two months.
As a platform, b.yond additionally aims to reduce complexities of launching a payment program and having to deal with multiple stakeholders in the payments ecosystem. With one contract from b.yond, businesses are offered everything required to launch a payments solution: from on-boarding and KYC (Know Your Customer), P2P transfers, card control, agency banking, physical or virtual cards, visualization of statements/spending and alert notification – with multi-FX, account load, multi-language, chat support, rewards and cash-back, saving pots, and tokenization.
b.yond also lets businesses deploy specialized vertical add-ons for travel and forex; expense management; ecommerce wallets; gift, loyalty and employee recognition; insurance technology, money remittance and membership. Businesses will also be able to test and monitor their propositions’ performance.
Commenting on the partnership and launch, Smriti Vicari, head of Fintech at Visa says: “At Visa we believe in the power of partnership to bring the best possible solutions to both emerging payment players and our existing clients and partners. The launch of b.yond is another big step towards enabling our clients to gain rapid access to the capabilities that lie within Visa’s global network to power their own ideas.”
Neil Harris, Co-Founder of b.yond and leader of the consortium says, “b.yond is breaking the mold with its consortium of industry leading companies who are coming together to drive fintech innovation to a new level of simplicity and speed.” a He further adds, “The project has been all about collaboration-led innovation and with an established list of other leading companies wanting to join the consortium, we expect the initial propositions to grow exponentially as we onboard new organizations and regions.”
For Fintechs and digital banks, Visa claims that b.yond offers advantages in terms of having the possibility to showcase to investors or VC funds the true potential of their product offering quickly and economically. For brands, this offers them the possibility to test their proposition prior to investing more funds towards development and marketing.
