Mollie teams with Plaid on customer onboarding

Dutch payment service provider, Mollie, has partnered with open finance network, Plaid.

Mollie will integrate with Plaid’s API to provide a more secure and easier bank verification experience for merchants during onboarding, in an effort to speed up payments.

The implementation will begin in the UK, followed by other European countries, including France and Germany, in the coming months.

“The partnership will allow us to offer our customers a fantastic solution to facilitate quick and easy onboarding, not only the first time they join Mollie but also as they grow their business abroad. Gone are the days of the overcomplicated verification method,” said Rogier Schoute, chief product officer at Mollie.

The partnership marks a significant win for Mollie, which has been aiming to grow its network and the connectivity of its platform to external services.

In March, the firm launched Connect for Platforms, an API designed to verify both the marketplace and sellers with KYC checks whilst enabling clients to accept and route payments.

Last month, Mollie also partnered with buy-now-pay-later-group, in3, enabling in3’s Netherlands customers to use Mollie’s services

The latest cooperation is part of Plaid’s expansion of its services beyond its core APIs that connect consumer bank accounts to financial applications, following its $250 million acquisition of identity verification technology provider Cognito.

“Embedding Plaid solutions into payment service providers like Mollie unlocks the power of open banking for thousands of merchants with significantly less time and fewer resources required to deploy and manage,” said Farid Sedjelmaci, head of European partnerships at Plaid.

Digital onboarding process gets the spotlight amid open finance maturity

The increasing demand for open banking services from financial institutions and start-ups, following the implementation of the PSD2 directive, has provided growth opportunities for payment and financial data providers.

Allied Market Research estimates that the global open banking market will reach around $43bn by 2026, registering a compound annual growth rate of 24.4% from 2019 to 2026.

The figure underscores the growing number of movements including consolidations, partnerships and capital raises in the industry.

For instance, in April, French financial data aggregator, Budget Insight, raised $35m in funding from growth equity firm PSG equity to scale up its business across Europe and the US.

A month later, UK open banking platform Yapily also expanded its services to include identity and age verification, among others, with the acquisition of German peer finAPI.

That same month, Synctera, the fintech development platform, entered into a service agreement with Mastercard to integrate the latter’s open banking platform to provide account verification services for Synctera-powered fintech firms.

Only last week, Visa partnered with Prove Identity to speed up the user onboarding process for Visa’s BNPL clients.

In February, TSB also launched its own customer onboarding journey, in partnership with digital identity verification provider, Onfido, through its mobile banking app.

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