SIA partners with Raphaels Bank on pan-European payments
The partnership will give UK and European businesses access to the STEP2 technology infrastructure for retail payments.
The partnership will give UK and European businesses access to the STEP2 technology infrastructure for retail payments.
SIA, the Italy-based of electronic payments manager and Raphaels Bank have signed a partnership agreement for the development and launch of payment solutions in the UK and across Europe.
Under the agreement, Raphaels and SIA will offer single euro payments area (SEPA) payments services to clients through the Bank’s indirect participation in the SEPA credit transfer and SEPA direct debit (SCT/SDD) schemes. This will allow both UK and European businesses to access STEP2, EBA Clearing’s pan-European technology infrastructure for retail payments in euro managed by SIA. It currently processes over 40m operations per day and more than 4,800 financial institutions in 34 European countries are reachable.
SIA said that the partnership will also strengthen their positions in the prepaid cards market. SIA currently processes 3.3bn card transactions and manages over 65m payment cards in 16 European countries, whilst Raphaels settles over £6bn annually across its portfolio of prepaid, credit and debit cards.
In the mobile payments sphere, SIA will enable Raphaels, a principal member of Visa and MasterCard, to offer contactless payments on smartphones through its “SIA EasyPay” platform. In addition, Raphaels will be also able to offer instant payments to its clients through “Jiffy”, SIA’s “person to person” (P2P) payments service and based on SCT which enables customers to send and receive money in real time via a smartphone.