In the rapidly growing Romanian ecommerce market, fintech Paysera has commenced with provision of a payment initiation service based on open banking where online payments are made by initiating them from an account with the buyer’s bank.
Payment initiation from the buyer’s account became available to e-shops when the most popular banks in Romania – Banca Transilvania, BCR, ING Bank, Revolut – granted access to the accounts of clients on the basis of open banking, and Paysera performed the integration of the bank systems.
CEO of Paysera LT, Vytenis Morkūnas, commented: “Financial technologies based on open banking brought greater competition to Europe. For businesses and private customers, these technologies mean a wider choice and lower prices.
“Payment initiation is one such financial innovation. It is widely popular across the Baltics where our payment initiation from the buyer’s account is used by almost 10,000 e-shops – where buyers spent EUR 315 million in 2020. According to our data, payments using this method constitute over 70 per cent of the turnover of e-merchants in the Baltics.”
Romanian e-shops sold goods and services for EUR 5.6 billion, or 30 per cent more than the previous year – it is one of the hottest e-commerce markets in the EU according to the growth rate.
The Second Payment Services Directive (PSD2) adopted by the EU created the preconditions for payment initiation. The banks were obligated to grant access to fintech companies and other third parties to their data through programming interfaces (of course, user protection is ensured at all times).
