For businesses looking to remain competitive in today’s crowded financial ecosystem, integrated payment services stand out as an innovative solution to customer engagement and retention.
For Tricount, a Belgian fintech and pioneer in group expenses management serving a community of more than 5.2 million registered users, integrating payments into the user experience (UX) was the next logical step in the evolution of their application.
The app was designed to make splitting group expenses across multiple currencies with family and friends simple, and adding the ability to let users reimburse expenses through in-app bank transfers removed the final point of friction in the process to allow users to pay for their own expenses in a shared expenses situation.
We partnered with Aion Bank and Mastercard to create a seamless ‘one-click’ payments experience that enabled Tricount users to settle their shared expenses across multiple currencies without needing to leave the app, this leaving the user completely free and no group member owes money to another group member even when there is no internet connection.
Discover How Open Banking and BaaS are Enabling Innovation.
The power of partnerships
Jonathan Fallon, Co-Founder of Tricount, explained in a recent Fintech Finance Virtual Arena webinar how key features of BaaS integration enabled them to expand their offering to customers and extend their reach to a larger user base while meeting strict regulatory requirements.
“The user experience aspect is very important for consumer facing products like Tricount, so that’s where Open Banking is really an added value, as we can focus on our core value and job, which is creating good-looking, simple, usable consumer-facing products without having to take responsibility for the more technical regulatory work.”
“It’s really important to stay focused on what you do and what you do well and that’s precisely what we’ve achieved with this partnership.”
With back-end support from Vodeno’s cloud-native, API-based technology, the compliance and regulatory expertise of ECB-licenced Aion Bank and Mastercard’s Open Banking Connect gateway, Tricount was able to create a ‘bank agnostic’ offering that allowed users to send bank-to-bank transfers securely.
Fallon added,
“We want to offer our services to a larger number of people, so it was important for us to have something that was bank agnostic. The partnership means that Tricount can exchange information with multiple banks using common channels and standard formats, reducing the effort and costs involved when changing banks and minimising counterparty risks.”
How Open Banking and PSD2 create a seamless UX
For Tricount’s users, integrated settlement powered by Open Banking removed the final layer of friction in the expense management process for several people in the easiest way possible.
Guillebert de Dorlodot, who co-founded Tricount with Fallon, said:
“Repayments with direct bank transfers were a long-awaited feature for [our] Belgian users, and we believe this is one of the first PSD2 integrations that truly makes sense for consumers.”
Vodeno and Aion Bank leverage PSD2 banking standards to authenticate and link the Tricount app to users’ bank accounts and initiate payments.
Jonathan Fallon explains how these initiatives have resulted in simpler financial management for Tricount’s customers:
“It was important for us to have something that was bank agnostic…so Open Banking and PSD2 in this context was a promising fit, and with great enthusiasm, we partnered up with, Aion, Vodeno and Mastercard to make this happen. And the success is there, we can see people are using it, and it makes their trips easier to manage.”
Building future-led financial services with BaaS
By listening to the needs of their customers, Tricount is a shining example of how BaaS can deliver added value and drive business growth forward.
If your business has ambitious plans for expansion and is exploring how BaaS can help meet these demands, we offer a full suite of products and our API-based solution can easily and cost effectively connect with any fintech’s frontend.
