What is your company’s role in the payments industry (program manager, issuer, processor, service provider, etc.)?
B4B Payments is a regulated Electronic Money Institution in the UK and Lithuania authorised by the FCA and Bank of Lithuania to issue e-money across the UK and EEA region. In the US, we are a prepaid card program manager and corporate payments service provider. We are a Principal Member of Mastercard Europe and a partner of VISA Inc in the USA. We specialise in end-to-end payment innovation. With over 15 years of expertise in payments and now as part of the Banking Circle group of companies, B4B Payments is a globally recognised and trusted provider of card issuing and payment services. We launched our US business in 2019 and can service companies in both the European and American markets from a single platform. Since 2006 we’ve supported thousands of businesses delivering seamless, flexible payment services, from virtual and physical card issuing, direct payments, global payment and FX solutions. What kinds of payments do you support? Our turnkey card issuing services provide everything needed to create and manage a secure and flexible corporate funded prepaid debit scheme. Typically we handle corporate expenses, disbursements, incentives and payroll spend. We can also offer a scalable payment solution for managing high volumes of local and international payments, with low-cost foreign exchange rates and no hidden fees, corporates can pay and get paid globally, helping them benefit from new emerging markets, increased convenience, and reduced rates. As a BIN Sponsor and an E-money issuer in Europe, we enable Program Managers to issue cards and products through the Mastercard® network and manage all associated regulatory compliance. We are also an Apple eligible issuer with experience of both Mastercard’s MDES tokenization platform, as well as VTES with Visa. What kinds of special features do your products and services offer? Our turn-key card services and payment solutions are powered by an intuitive, easy to use platform and mobile app. The simple all in one management portal makes it easy to issue, activate and manage cards, load funds, and access a host of in-depth reporting features in real time. We use tokenization to manage cards and transactions minimizing dependence on transmitting personal information. Whilst the iOS and Android app allows cardholders to instantly view their card balance and transactions, and upload photographs of expense receipts, using the latest biometric login features to ensure the highest levels of cardholder security. Our robust and standard API allows corporates to integrate with a huge range of other software platforms, or build their own custom process. Our commercial model is streamlined, and uncomplicated, technical requirements are minimal and significant control is places in our client’s hands, we believe these are fundamentally important to our clients and partners On top of our core solution, we can offer significant lateral capability with multiple features on the same platform. As part of Banking Circle, we can leverage the core assets of the bank to take our value proposition to the next level so that clients of ours don’t need to go through a separate bank. This is hugely valuable to those who, on top of corporate expense, want to make volume payments outside of existing banking relationships, to send money overseas minimizing FX costs and make third party payments via secure accounts. As a regulated EMI in Europe and with scheme principal membership, we offer full bin sponsorship capabilities combined with the added benefit of being able to provide a full back-end banking solution including safeguarding accounts, virtual ibans for collection and disbursement of banking funds across 25 currencies. Our sister companies in the Banking Circle group can also offer BNPL and corporate financing solutions. What kinds of companies are you looking to partner with? Our innovative payment processing solutions enable any size organisation to manage expenses, pay-outs, reimbursements and incentives. Fintechs, insuretechs and other industry disruptors are also extremely interesting to us especially where they are looking for digital only payment solutions. Our solution is perfect as an embedded finance component, corporate businesses and aggregators can incorporate financial services into their own product and service to compliment what they already do. We also want to talk to successful US programs that are keen to support their global clients into Europe. We understand your business and can offer fast to market solutions with end-to-end support via our turnkey product or full bin sponsorship is also an option. What do you think the future of payments holds in the next five years? It’s a very exciting time for payments in the US as interest in digital payments continues to grow, having benefited from some shifts in digital adoption which appear to be accelerated by COVID-19. Innovators in all industries have embraced digital transformations and acceptance of digital first by consumers as such they are looking for embedded finance solutions within their own software and solutions versus going to a traditional bank for transactional services. Consumers expect payments to be as seamless as delivery of any other services and want payments to be connected directly to the devices in their lives. Industry innovators will partner with payment innovators rather than with traditional banks as those same consumers are now the corporates looking for the same level of service in the business world that they demand as individuals. Digital wallets will become normal, checks will go away, payments across the globe will approach real time and the unbanked and underbanked will have options to receive and transmit payments without holding cash. |
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