The service, which would create a fully online payments experience, would be offered in all banks in France, the Netherlands, and Spain, as well as in some banks in Belgium and in ING elsewhere across the continent. It will also be made available in many banks in Italy, Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic over the next few months.
Transfer initiation allows merchants to accept payments from their buyers’ bank account through a SEPA request that can be either made for instant payments or standard payments rails. This way, merchants can bypass card networks such as Mastercard or Visa, saving them the interchange fee.
President of Lyra, Alain Lacour, explained, as reported in Finyear, that the bypassing of the interchange fee was particularly beneficial in the case of purchases in ‘sectors such as luxury, interior design…. [which are] sections on which the amounts are particularly high.’ He also adds that transfer initiation allows merchants to ‘reach new buyers,’ such as ‘those who do not have bank cards.’
Lyra Network is a Toulouse-based fintech founded in 2001 by Alain Lacour. It works in creating secure payments solutions for businesses, processing 20 billion payments a year, and with 250,000 sites currently using its solution. It has 400 employees and 11 subsidiaries around the world, from India to Spain to Brazil. Its turnover in 2020 was USD 67 million.
In June 2022, Lyra signed an agreement with the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). Under the agreement, the NPCI’s real-time payment system, the Unified Payment Interface (UPI) and Indian card payment network Rupay would be accepted in France, facilitating the payments of (e.g.) Indian tourists in the country.
A 2020 study by Ernst & Young and Copenhagen Economics, prepared for the European Commission, revealed a 35% decrease in consumer cards’ interchange fees during the period 2015-2017.
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