Issuer processing powerhouse, Enfuce, has announced a new partnership with Orka Ventures. The Nordic-Czech fintech holding company has made this deal with Enfuce to launch Orka Card. This consumer lending card and mobile app will challenge the traditional understanding of ‘buy now pay later’ (BNPL) lending.
Until now, Orka Ventures has focused mainly on providing web-based consumer loans. However, with changing consumer demand for more agile service delivery and Orka Ventures’ evolution into a neobank, it will now leverage agile modular processing and compliance capabilities from Enfuce to launch card services across its European markets. With these new capabilities, the Orka Card will enable customers to integrate their existing bank accounts in one card and app.
BNPL 2.0
The Orka Card will also incorporate Orka Ventures’ Pay Now Finance Later (PNFL) programme. Customers will be able to choose to refinance a transaction that was originally executed through other debit and credit cards. This is a new take on BNPL lending.
Cardholders can repay a previously purchased item on a payment plan in fixed monthly instalments. In allowing this, Orka Ventures is facilitating financial literacy and financial health, through reducing a borrower’s risk of overextension.
In Iceland, the Orka Card mobile app will enable open banking connections by integrating customers’ bank accounts and supporting its PNFL feature. Furthermore, this will enable Orka Ventures to gather dynamic data and real-time understanding about its customers. This includes spending habits, income and expenses data. For Orka Ventures, the new product will allow it to better understand its customers. In turn, allowing it to offer tailored loans to suit its customers’ needs and habits.
Established in 2016 in Finland, Enfuce is an issuer processor that can launch a payment card for businesses in eight weeks. It is already trusted by more than 35 partners. Through one core integration into its cloud processing platform, Enfuce’s platform converts data into PSD2-compliant data. It ensures that account information data (AIS) and payment initiation (PIS) APIs can be securely exposed to third parties. In turn, this will enable smooth and secure payment experiences for Orka Ventures and its customers.
Orka Ventures has been serving customers for over a decade from its home in Iceland. It has established separate brands in the Czech Republic, and Denmark, and also selected Enfuce as a trusted partner in the Nordics to support its planned growth into that region.
Plans for the future
As well as its existing locations, Enfuce will work with Orka Ventures to launch Orka Card in Finland, Sweden and Norway. The organisation has plans to rename its separate brands and offer products under the Orka Card brand name across Europe to more than 500,000 customers. Orka Ventures will benefit from Enfuce’s cloud-native agility, rapid onboarding speed and pan-European compliance expertise to launch products quickly, securely and cost-effectively.
Orka Ventures’ mission
Ondřej Šmakal, CEO of Orka Ventures, comments:
“At the beginning of 2022, Orka Ventures was looking for a new partner to support the development and launch of Orka Card. We chose Enfuce because of its excellent technical expertise, supportive team and great attitude to problem-solving. Enfuce is now a part of our team. Our developers consistently give us feedback about how easy it is to integrate with Enfuce’s platform.
“It was also important to us to choose a partner that is willing to support the expansion of Orka Card into the Nordic markets. In addition to working with us in Iceland too. This is not common as it’s a small country with complicated regulations.
“We want Orka Ventures to grow sustainably by nurturing and further monetising the relationships we have with our existing customer base. By offering them services that are useful, we can grow our revenue and eventually our customer base. Especially if they probably won’t be offered these same services by legacy banks.
“From a customer perspective, Orka Ventures’ aim is to bring fair, convenient and sustainable consumer lending to customers who are often excluded from lending or loan opportunities with our new, premium product.”
Enfuce’s mission
Denise Johansson, co-founder and co-CEO of Enfuce, says:
“The Enfuce mission is to remove the complexity of payments and provide flexible payment solutions that enable our customers to grow and provide an excellent customer experience to their end-customers. We’re confident that our partnership with Orka Ventures will deliver real value to consumers in the core markets of Iceland and the Nordic regions.”
Monika Liikamaa, co-founder and co-CEO of Enfuce, adds:
“Supporting the growth of an inspiring fintech with the kind of big ambitions Orka has, is what Enfuce is all about. Our partnership with Orka demonstrates our joint commitment to smashing down barriers and promoting financial inclusion. Using Enfuce’s cloud-native card issuing platform, Orka Ventures is set to bring sustainable consumer lending to more customers across Europe.”
Further expansion
The new partnership follows Enfuce’s entrance into the UK in July 2022. There, it brought its cloud-native CaaS platform to Europe’s largest and most active fintech hotbed. Led by its co-founders and co-CEOs, Enfuce secured €45million in Series C funding from Vitruvian Partners, a global investment firm. Virtuvian Partners’ intent is to support the most ambitious, high-growth companies.
Enfuce is using the funding to kickstart its expansion across Europe. It’s aim is to become the go-to payments partner for companies in every sector. Especially as embedded finance opportunities open up to meet urgent consumer and business demand.
The company offers a fast alternative to existing issuer processing platforms. It has the agility to quickly add modules as and when needed, and a flexible pricing model. Enfuce supports debit, credit, prepaid, gift, fleet and fuel card programmes in any form – plastic, digital and/or tokenised – for consumer, commercial and B2B applications, along with digital wallets.
Enfuce’s CaaS ensures banks, fintechs, financial institutions and non-bank brands can become and remain fully PSD2-compliant. This means programme management, data reporting and analytics, BIN sponsorship, card issuing, and regulatory KYC/AML and payment scheme compliance are all taken care of. Clients can launch card payment services for customers with quicker time-to-market, give third-party service providers access to digital accounts, and give customers and end users even more choices in payment methods.
