SIA partners with Raphaels Bank for payments
SEPA
Italian payments firm SIA has teamed with Raphaels Bank to develop and launch payment solutions in the UK and across Europe.
As part of the agreement, UK-based Raphaels and SIA will offer SEPA payments services to clients through the bank’s “indirect participation” in the SEPA Credit Transfer and SEPA Direct Debit schemes.
Cristina Astore, head of SIA North West Europe, says the deal represents an “ideal combination between our respective areas of expertise, issuing prepaid programmes on one side and managing state-of-the-art technology services around payments on the other side”.
SIA says the alliance will allow both UK and European businesses to access STEP2, EBA Clearing’s pan-European technology infrastructure for retail payments in euro managed by SIA. It currently processes over 40 million operations per day on average and more than 4,800 financial institutions in 34 European countries are reachable, according to SIA.
The partnership will also be used for the prepaid cards market. SIA says it currently processes 3.3 billion card transactions and manages over 65 million payment cards in 16 European countries, whilst Raphaels settles over £6 billion annually across its portfolio of prepaid, credit and debit cards.
In the mobile payments sphere, SIA will enable Raphaels, a “principal” member of Visa and MasterCard, to offer contactless payments on smartphones through the SIA EasyPay platform. It supports both SIM-based and Host Card Emulation (HCE) technology.
In addition, Raphaels will be able to offer instant payments to its clients through SIA’s Jiffy, a P2P payments service based on SEPA Credit Transfer which enables customers to send and receive money in real time via a smartphone.
SIA will also provide its Payment Gateway platform to connect multiple channels, such as ATMs, POS and cash registers.
