The bolder, bigger and borderless third season of the Visa Innovation Program is steadily moving ahead. The participants are actively working on their innovative solutions, and we continue to present them in more detail.
Today, we introduce another two promising fintechs. The first one is the UK/Bulgarian eVostro – a diaspora BaaS Solution for Traditional Banks (cross border payments facilitation). The second one is the Polish startup Tap2Pay, which activates payments on all digital channels – websites, social networks, messengers.
At a glance:
The Problem
The Traditional Banks are losing market share to Neobanks both at domestic and international markets. Customers are turning to Neobanks like Revolut or N26, which meet their banking needs better, especially when away from home by ensuring faster and more efficient banking services… And this is where eVostro comes in.
The Solution
eVostro aims to reimagine banking and payments leveraging Distributed Ledger Technologies. The platform is a BaaS full fledged solution for traditional banks and it can be seamlessly linked into their existing infrastructure using the innovative and proven technology. Depending on what stage of their digitalization journey they are in, banks can pick relevant components of the eVostro Diaspora Solution and gain a competitive advantage to neobanks.
Why is this important?
eVostro empowers traditional banks to challenge the challengers by making Diaspora banking much more viable and more cost efficient. On the other hand, the solution enables the banks’ customers to send and receive funds globally hassle free. eVostro offers traditional banks inclusivity, retention of customers, less expensive correspondent banking and data insights.
Founder Blitz
In order to learn even more intriguing insights, our team met with eVostro’s founders for a quick “founder blitz”.
1. What inspired you to start eVostro?
Having served many years within the world of payments, we have observed and been inspired by the developments and convergence of Automated Clearing Houses (ACH) and card payment schemes. We have watched the development of real time payment rails and open banking but felt that there is much opportunity with these systems that is not currently being grasped.
3. What is the biggest challenge you have come against since you established eVostro?
The biggest challenge for us has been obtaining regulatory licencing and seeking the ideal partners required to build out an industry grade, scalable technical solution and proven certified operational solution. Our core system is SWIFT-certified and already used by tier II banks and central banks. Our operational capability is industry-certified and is used to process over 40 acquiring banks, and 300 corporates in Brazil today. Another challenge we have risen to was assembling a board of directors and advisors with unrivalled expertise and experience across the sector including Paysafe, SWIFT, the European Central Bank, PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, ING UK and Vocalink. We think this is a key part of our proposition.
2. What is your next big milestone?
We intend to build a proof of concept (POC) for cross border EU/Brazil payments with one of the largest Brazilian payment service providers, integrating with PIX in Brazil, and with TIPS and FPS in the EU. We seek similar partnerships with partners in SEE connected to real time payments, in countries such as Romania and Bulgaria. We intend to leverage Visa Direct within this solution for issuing and acquiring.
4. What does success look like for eVostro?
Success for eVostro, would be the empowerment of the next generation of payment and ecommerce services using sovereign identity for signup. We would like to deliver a kind of global version of SWISH and BankID in Sweden, which we greatly admire as being a major success, based on real time payments.
At a glance:
The Problem
Tap2Pay solves some of the major challenges merchants are facing when selling on social media: These include:
- 8-10 step checkout process
- Limited payments options
- Cross-channel sales management
The Solution
Tap2Pay is a platform that accepts online payments for SMBs with a high conversion rate on all digital channels: websites, social networks, and popular messengers. It provides a secure, seamless, omnichannel buying experience in 2 clicks via express checkout widget without any redirection or registration. With Tap2Pay a merchant could sell just from a Facebook post or an Instagram profile. A buyer after a click on the post will get an invoice right away in the messenger of choice and ready to pay by card, PayPal, bank accounts, etc.
Why is this important?
Tap2Pay makes it easy for merchants to attract new customers, easy to integrate payments and easy for customers to buy and find places of interest via bonus. The main advantages are that the platform provides a loyalty program for customers, digitizes purchases to provide additional analytics for merchants and offers a variety of payment methods.
Founder Blitz
Meet Tap2Pay’s founders and learn more about their vision and the next milestones for the company in our “founder blitz”.
1. What inspired you to start Tap2Pay?
The idea came from a personal need. The Founder’s wife was willing to sell a product via Instagram and social media as well as from a website. After analyzing the market we found out that it is an empty niche.
3. What is the biggest challenge you have come against since you established Tap2Pay?
Our biggest challenge is to bring the best people into the company.
2. What is your next big milestone?
To reach 5000 merchants across EU and USA.
4. What does success look like for Tap2Pay?
Build a brand that will be connected in the minds of merchants as a “Digital payment activator for my business” .