A consortium of major companies, in collaboration with Visa, has launched the new b.yond payment platform.
It is a new financial innovation platform that allows companies to implement digital payment services, improving customer loyalty, with solutions that can be implemented in 4-8 weeks.
Companies can already start testing b.yond services with a limited number of cards and wallets, offering their customers loyalty and interaction programs that can be implemented quickly, and accessing the financial technology platform with Visa guides.
The founders of the consortium are Global Processing Services, Pannovate, Cornercard, Modulr, AllPay, Meawallet and W2 Global, and also collaborating with Visa itself.
As a platform, b.yond aims to reduce the complexity of starting loyalty programs by reducing the need to deal with multiple parties within the payment ecosystem.
With a single contract, in fact – explains the press release – companies will have everything they need to start a payment solution: onboarding and KYC (Know Your Customer), P2P transfers, card control, banking agencies, physical or virtual cards, statement viewing, notifications, multilingual support, chat support, rewards and cash-back, tokens and other news that will be announced shortly.
It also allows companies to implement vertical add-ons on travel and forex, expense management, e-commerce wallets, employee recognition, insurtech, money remittances and subscriptions.
Visa’s Head of Fintech, Smriti Vicari, said:
“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, a co-founder of b.yond and leader of the consortium, added:
“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”.