The fintech Paysera continues to cultivate Romania’s booming e-commerce space with a payment initiation service.
The payment initiation service created by Paysera is built upon open banking technology and allows online transactions to be made by initiating them from an account with the buyer’s bank. By launching this service, the fintech has joined a small handful of companies who currently offer this kind of technology in Romania.
In 2020, Romania was named as the world’s 50th largest e-commerce market, generating $2 billion worth of revenue; surpassing even the e-commerce market of Bangladesh. Showing an increase of 39% growth last year, the country’s digital markets are expected to develop alongside their rate of fintech adoption.
The ability to initiate payment directly from the buyer’s account first became available to Romanian e-shops when the most popular banks în Romania, including Banca Transilvania, BCR, ING Bank, and Revolut – granted access to the accounts of clients on the basis of open banking, and Paysera performed the integration of the bank systems.
“Financial technologies based on open banking brought greater competition to Europe. For businesses and private customers, these technologies mean a wider choice and lower prices. Payment initiation is one such financial innovation. It is widely popular across the Baltics where our payment initiation from the buyer’s account is used by almost 10,000 e-shops – where buyers spent €315 million in 2020. According to our data, payments using this method constitute over 70% of the turnover of e-merchants in the Baltics,” says the CEO of Paysera LT, Vytenis Morkūnas.
The Second Payment Services Directive (PSD2) adopted by the EU created the preconditions for payment initiation. The banks were obligated to grant access to fintech companies and other third parties to their data through programming interfaces (of course, user protection is ensured at all times).
Paysera collects online payments for more than 13,000 e-shops, allowing them to accept payments by card, payment initiation from the buyer’s account, and through the Bank Link accounting service. Last year, buyers in shops serviced by the fintech company spent €580 million.
