Pleo partners with Yapily

Research shows that poor cash flow management causes 82% of businesses to fail. Pleo and Yapily partnered to address this problem through Open Banking solutions. By gaining access to Yapily Payments, Pleo users can now top up their Pleo account directly from their bank account. This enables customers to obtain funds instantly, reportedly overcoming lengthy settlement times at an average of 48 hours. As a result, European businesses and employees are able to access faster cash injections where needed, and better calculate and manage their cash flow.

In August 2022, Pleo saw 54% of its customers’ first wallet load done via the Open Banking platform. In almost six months, Yapily has enabled Pleo to process over GBP 10 million in Open Banking payments, helping thousands of businesses to solve their spend management challenges and take back control over cash flow. Through the partnership, Pleo can deliver operational efficiency, improved simplicity, and a better experience to its customers, according to an official press release.

As stated by the company, Pleo customers will also benefit from added security. With the user’s consent, a direct connection between the Pleo platform and the user’s bank account is made by Yapily to initiate the transfer of funds, reducing the risk of both potential card fraud and human error for the customer, the press release continues.

The Chief Product Officer at Pleo believes that the partnership with Yapily allows the two companies to maximise the benefits of Open Banking technology to enable improved user journeys. He considers manual processes, settlement periods, and bottlenecks in cash flow to be ‘avoidable obstacles’. Pleo wishes to allow its users to focus on ‘what really matters: growing their business and empowering their people.’

The CEO at Yapily added that by partnering with Pleo, Yapily takes a step further in its mission to improve the financial lives of millions of businesses and consumers through Open Banking. He stated that ‘current market conditions mean that businesses in the UK and across Europe are looking for ways to better manage costs and increase cash flow now more than ever.’ Yapily will help Pleo’s customers while the latter continues its expansion campaign in Europe.

Open Banking top-ups for Pleo customers will be rolled out across Europe over the coming months of 2022, starting with the Netherlands and France. Pleo also plans to leverage other Yapily payments solutions following the latter’s launch of Variable Recurring Payments product in August 2022.

What is Pleo?

Pleo is a smart business spending solution provider that offers company cards and automated expense reports for employees. According to Pleo, its offering seeks to enable customers to buy the things they need for work while giving finance teams control and visibility of all company spending. Pleo catches receipts on the go, automatically categorises expenses based on previous behaviour, and eliminates the need to do manual expense reports, the press release says.

Pleo was founded in Copenhagen in 2015. Today, over 20,000 companies are using Pleo across twelve European markets. 

In December 2021, Pleo announced a funding of USD 200 million. The company planned to use the funding in areas like M&A, expanding to new countries, bringing more functionality into its core product, and generally expanding its presence as an enabler of ‘the future of work’.

What is Yapily?

Yapily is an Open Finance platform focused on building infrastructure and tools to enable the next wave of innovation. It connects companies to banks using a secure open API, enabling businesses to embed Open Banking into their products and services. Yapily has customers ranging from fintechs to Fortune 500 companies across Europe, operating in several financial services verticals including Payments, Wealth, Accounting, Banking & Lending, the press release concludes.

In recent news, Yapily rolled out Yapily Virtual Accounts to bring more transparency to real-time payments, in August 2022. Prior to this announcement, Yapily released Yapily Variable Recurring Payments (VRP) to accelerate innovation across the Open Banking ecosystem.

Yapily’s intentions to expand in the European markets were made evident through the acquisition of FinAPI. In May 2022, the company signed an agreement with Germany-based credit bureau SCHUFA to acquire finAPI, a provider of Open Banking solutions in Germany.