Vanquis Bank partners with NatWest’s Payit
Payit, NatWest’s open banking-powered payment service, has partnered with Vanquis Bank.
Vanquis is a subsidiary of British sub-prime lender, Provident Financial Group. It focuses on helping consumers build up their credit.
London-based, RBS-backed fintech, Pollinate, started building a pilot for Payit in September 2019
Its partnership with Payit will see Vanquis users able to initiate payments via their banking app without using a debit card.
What changes?
For Vanquis users, this new payment integration means an end to pending payments. It also means users will always know exactly how much credit is available to them.
Using a debit card takes a lot longer for a transaction to reach a user’s account. NatWest cites two-to-three business days. Payit also means Vanquis customers will receive instant updates to their available credit.
All major UK banks can use Payit. Nationwide was the last to be added, supposedly joining the list late last month.
“Following launch [in July], we are now scaling Payit up at pace with our customers and look forward to welcoming further new businesses in the coming weeks,” says Paul Thwaite, NatWest’s commercial banking CEO.
Evolution of Payit
Payit was designed to make ecommerce payments easier. Its ability to jump the debit card step in a transaction raises important questions.
Namely, how are the likes of Visa and Mastercard going to stay relevant in an open banking-powered bank-to-bank payment process?
London-based, RBS-backed fintech, Pollinate, started building a pilot for Payit in September 2019 with public technology company Endava.
Pollinate also built Tyl for NatWest – a merchant payment platform in competition with the likes of iZettle, Worldpay and Square.
NatWest says it is one of the first banks to utilise open banking as a payment initiation service provider (PISP). That’s rather than as an account information aggregator (AISP).
Read next: NatWest launches its no-card payments service Payit
