Lena Hackelöer is a CEO and founder at Brite Payments. Previously, she had many years of experience in Klarna payment service and in the European fintech and payments landscape since 2010. Exploring the payment initiation and instant bank payment landscape over all these years, Hackelöer decided to focus on the instant payment category, which became a key for the industry, consumers, and merchants, while creating Brite Payments.
In the Payment Expert podcast, she discussed the early rise of second-generation fintech in Sweden, the importance of instant payments in the current payments industry, and the positives for both merchants and customers.
“I think one of the benefits of the category we’re in is that we transfer funds dir
ectly from consumer to merchant. The number of parties involved in that payment transaction is fewer than what you’d be used to in your average payment transaction today.
“It’s all API-based, so it’s fairly scalable to implement across a wide range of verticals and at the same time able to offer a very smooth and easy consumer process.”
Hackelöer also explained that previously people had two steps payment. When consumers use a bank account to make a payment, they first authenticate, show the accounts available to make a payment, and then sign off on the transaction. Brite Payments uses open banking to condense that into just one step, which she finds is a big step forward.
“Because it does increase the consumer convenience aspect quite significantly and ultimately contributes to higher sales, higher conversion, and smoother payments overall that is something that’s very specific to us in the context of our category.”
She continues: “Essentially when we talk about instant payments, we’re talking about a few seconds of payments, and that has benefits both for the consumer and the merchant.
“From a consumer point of view obviously being able to make a fast payment is always nice, and receiving payment within just a few seconds is especially nice. And it’s not a common standard today.”
With the rapid nature of e-commerce payments and the need for a quicker service from consumers, instant payments have become an increasingly popular method of payment to not appease customers but to attract new customers too.
From a merchant’s point of view, an instant payment means taking away a lot of the fraud and credit risk of a transaction. Funds are received within seconds, they are already in the system, so the fraught risk has got massively decreased.
“That is an important KPI for most merchants that are looking to grow their online businesses.”
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