Answer Pay secures bill payments in banking apps. Their platform connects banks to Request to Pay (RTP), a messaging standard for payments. Complementing existing payment infrastructure, it gives payees the ability to request a payment and send an invoice using their corporate bank interface.
Partner Hub takes invoice data from enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and both reformats this for invoice presentation and automatically generates payment requests over the Request-to-Pay (RTP) networks offered by Answer Pay.
Available from Answer Pay across the Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) and the UK, RTP easier for businesses to collect regular payments from their customers avoiding issues such as direct debit failures due to insufficient funds.
As the cost-of-living crisis increasingly bites, many businesses are struggling to collect payments from their customers. Subscription numbers are declining and consumers are cancelling direct debits in favour of alternative payment methods that give them more control. However, these alternatives such as cash, cards, and cheques can cost more and introduce friction with conversion typically much lower.
E-invoicing is a hot topic for many European businesses as many nations look to make them mandatory. Italy, France, and Poland have already obtained authorisation from the European commission to introduce a mandate with Belgium, Latvia, Romania, Spain, Slovenia, and Slovakia all commencing the process. Compliance is therefore likely to be another key driver in RTP adoption.
In many cases, the adoption of the electronic invoice is accompanied by the introduction of other constraints and solutions such as CTC (Continuous Transaction Control), related to the digital management of tax compliance, with the aim of achieving greater traceability.
One of the most widely used protocols used in different countries to manage the communication of tax data to the competent authorities is SAF-T. Through a structured path of various profiles depending on the country of reference, this protocol makes it possible to communicate the data required from time to time by the authority and according to the legislation of each state. That’s why, although it is the same reporting protocol, there may be differences in the layout, period, and type of data to be submitted.
The purpose of SEPA RTP is to digitise the payment process, specifically the exchange of information and messages before payment itself, which is currently managed separately.
The scheme is a set of rules developed by the European Payments Council (EPC) to establish how a payee can request payment from a payer online or in-person. The payer can then confirm or reject the request, provide alternate information if desired, and choose to pay immediately or on a future date.
Therefore, the payer-payee interaction is decoupled from the payment itself, which could mean fewer possible sources of friction for the payer and a greater variety of service providers, including fintechs, providing the customer interface that facilitates it all.The hope is that RTP will help banks improve their overall digital experience in order to compete with other online payment methods, resulting in smoother authentication flows and smoother redirects. Whether this might extend to banks improving their PSD2 APIs, or prioritising SRTP flows, remains to be seen.
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