Consortium of major companies launch b.yond, a new financial innovation platform
A consortium of major companies have launched b.yond, a financial innovation platform that will let banks and consumer-facing businesses rapidly deploy a range of innovative fintech payment services.
Today’s digital-first customers demand service excellence, and will give recurring business to brands that deliver the slickest and most innovative ones well. b.yond has been created to address this challenge, allowing businesses to drive customer loyalty, retention and engagement with sticky, digital financial offerings that can be deployed fast. b.yond users will benefit from the innovation, expertise and scale of the consortium partners.
Businesses wanting to launch a payments programme can use b.yond to access a financial technology platform of high-quality, innovative payment solutions using Visa’s rails, which they can deploy for customers in less than 8 weeks.
As a platform, b.yond additionally aims to reduce complexities of launching a payment programme and having to deal with multiple stakeholders in the payments ecosystem. With one contract from b.yond, businesses will have everything required to launch a payments solution: from on-boarding and KYC (Know Your Customer), P2P transfers, card control, agency banking, physical or virtual cards, visualisation of statements/spending and alert notification – with Multi-FX, account load, Multi-language, chat support, rewards and cash-back, saving pots, tokenisation, and more to follow shortly.
b.yond also lets businesses deploy specialised vertical add-ons for travel and forex; expense management; ecommerce wallets; gift, loyalty and employee recognition; insurtech; money remittance and membership. Businesses can test and monitor their propositions’ performance.
Commenting on the partnership and launch, Smriti Vicari, head of fintech at Visa adds: “At Visa we believe in the power of partnership to bring the best possible solutions to both emerging payment players and our existing clients and partners. The launch of b.yond is another big step towards enabling our clients to gain rapid access to the capabilities that lie within Visa’s global network to power their own ideas.”
Neil Harris, co-founder of b.yond and leading the consortium says, “b.yond is breaking the mould with its consortium of industry leading companies who are coming together to drive fintech innovation to a new level of simplicity and speed.” a He further adds, “The project has been all about collaboration-led innovation and with an established list of other leading companies wanting to join the consortium, we expect the initial propositions to grow exponentially as we onboard new organisations and regions.”
For fintechs and digital banks this is a true game changer and yields great advantages in terms of having the possibility to showcase to investors or VC funds the true potential of their product offering quickly and economically. For brands, this offers them the possibility to test their proposition prior to investing more funds towards development and marketing.
