BNP Paribas has announced that it will deploy a new payment method called Instanea that is constructed on top of the Open Banking infrastructure instantiated by Token. It has long been recognized that Open Banking enables access to a bank’s payment infrastructure and that by integrating across a sufficient number of banks an alternative payment infrastructure could be developed.
While merchants would like to get off the traditional payment rails to lower their costs, this is difficult without standardization and brand safety. Token has been integrating to a large number of banks, but lacked brand safety and isn’t a standard. With the backing of BNP Paribas Token Pay may gain the status of defacto standard and gains the brand safety of BNP Paribas.
“Leading open banking payments platform, Token, and BNP Paribas, today announced the launch of the first online payments service to combine the power of SEPA Instant and PSD2 APIs, two major initiatives from the European Payments Council. Developed with Token, BNP Paribas Instanea is a turnkey instant payments initiation solution. It delivers account-to-account (A2A) payment capabilities to dramatically enhance the speed and increase the security of transactions for merchants across Europe.
Token’s open payments platform is driving the shift from traditional payment methods to A2A payments. It provides pan-European connectivity to banks, and rich functionality to enable existing Payment Service Providers (PSPs) to benefit from open banking capabilities.
BNP Paribas Instanea will easily integrate with popular shopping carts and payment gateways to deliver immediate payment settlement and enhance security. Risks like chargeback, are also eliminated as payments are authenticated by the customer in their banking portal.
“SEPA Instant has provided a foundation for additional fast and secure payment solutions for our eCommerce clients,” comments Carlo Bovero, Global Head of Cards and Innovative Payments at BNP Paribas. “The advent of open banking APIs presents a unique opportunity to innovate and deliver instant payments at scale. Token’s technology has equipped us with an unrivaled breadth of API connectivity. BNP Paribas Instanea empowers merchants to leverage open banking APIs to manage cash-flow in real-time and deliver better checkout experiences.”
Overview by Tim Sloane, VP, Payments Innovation at Mercator Advisory Group