French fintech Lydia launches digital banking app Sumeria
French fintech start-up Lydia is splitting its financial services app into two and launching a new digital banking brand called Sumeria, into which it plans to invest over €100 million and hire 400 people over the next three years.
French fintech Lydia launches banking app
The company’s unveiling of Sumeria comes just over a month after it announced the launch of its new app Lydia Accounts, which will support a service remit solely focused on peer-to-peer (P2P) payments.
Lydia launched in 2013 as a P2P payments app and has gradually added more financial services features over the years.
When launching Lydia Accounts, the start-up acknowledged that despite its best efforts to create an “all-in-one product”, consumers who primarily used its original P2P service “gradually lost this magical experience” due to the app’s scaled development. As a result, the firm says the “promise of a clean and relevant design, for everyone, could no longer be kept”.
As such, Lydia, which currently serves 8 million users throughout France, Spain and Germany, will now offer its P2P service separately from its digital banking proposition through the Lydia Accounts app, while the original Lydia app will now become Sumeria.
All of the more advanced features incorporated into the Lydia app over the years, like stock trading, savings accounts and loans, will transition over to its new banking brand.
Sumeria will offer an online account with 4% interest on cash balances for the first three months, with the ambition to service five million customers by 2027. The firm says it is also in pursuit of a credit institution licence from the French Prudential Supervision and Resolution Authority “in order to write the future pages of this new chapter” for Sumeria.
