Token and Computop join forces

Using Token’s Open Banking connectivity and platform, Computop enables account-to-account (A2A) payments for ecommerce merchants, whitelabel partners, and resellers using its Paygate platform.

Token is an Open Banking enabler for the payments industry. It offers a broad Open Banking connectivity in the UK and Europe, providing a simple way for payment service providers (PSP), gateways, and acquirers to launch and manage A2A payment propositions. Computop is a global payments company, with 38% of Germany’s market share, and customers across Europe, the UK, China, and US. The Paygate platform enables integrated payment processes for ecommerce merchants, features over 350 payment types from all over the world, and transferred payments totalling a value of USD 36 billion in 2022.

Open Banking payments

Computop’s new Open Banking payments service is helping merchants to respond to the growing appetite for a convenient alternative to card payments. Juniper Research predicts Open Banking payments will exceed USD 116 billion in 2026, and a study by Token has illustrated growing consumer appetite is driving this uptake in Europe. In Germany alone, 85% of consumers said they would likely use A2A payment methods in the future, meaning PSPs and merchants must act now to ready themselves for future demand.

Today, the Token platform covers 14 UK and EU countries representing 250 million potential end-users of Open Banking services. The company is processing millions of Open Banking payments annually for the UK and Europe’s payment service providers (PSPs), gateways, banks, and large merchants.

Open Banking payments have the potential to offer greater payment choice to merchants and customers. There are now over 2.5 million Open Banking payments a month. In 2018, there was a total of 320,000 open banking payments. A number of major UK merchants offer Open Banking payments as a way to pay.

Collaboration is the key

Open Banking requires and depends on partnerships – from suppliers to business collaborators and from vendors to customers. Banks have to build an ecosystem of alliances.

Open Banking fosters a platform model, which in turn creates a marketplace of third-party services that can be plugged into a bank’s existing systems, reducing the friction, costs, and time it would take for a bank to build new infrastructure on its own.

Leveraging an open platform, fintechs can make their apps and offerings available to banks – and therefore, the banks’ customers – in an efficient way. Moreover, rather than one-to-one transactions between individual entities, Open Banking facilitates a ‘many-to-many’ ecosystem.