EMEA Daily: Germany’s N26 Teams With Stripe

In today’s top stories from Europe, the Middle East and Africa, German digital bank N26 works with Stripe to expand its account top-up options.

Also, African money transfer service M-Pesa teams up with Visa on a virtual payment card service and PYMNTS interviews British FinTech Twig about the rise of reselling among young fashion and electronics consumers.

Stripe Helps German Digital Bank N26 with Account Top-Ups

German neobank N26 is preparing to venture into new sectors after a collaboration with financial infrastructure firm Stripe expanded its payment options.

According to an announcement on Stripe’s website, N26 turned to the company to streamline the account top-up process, which lets consumers add funds to their accounts.

“An essential part of any banking experience is adding funds to your account,” Stripe said. “The traditional way of topping up an account is a SEPA (Single Euro Payments Area) transfer, which requires both the sender’s bank and the receiver’s bank to be registered as SEPA members. N26 wanted to offer another option, one that was quick, easy, and flexible enough to work with a wide range of funding methods.”

M-Pesa Partners with Visa for Virtual Card Payments in Africa

African money transfer service M-Pesa is working with Visa on a virtual payment card service in an effort to tap into the continent’s $40 billion subscriptions market.

Called the M-Pesa Global Pay Visa Virtual Card, the service allows users to pay merchants from their mobile phones, without needing credit cards or accounts with companies like PayPal.

The card will also be aimed at the subscription market for things like Netflix and Spotify and is available for over 30 million M-Pesa users in Kenya, with plans to be debuted in Tanzania, Mozambique, Congo, Lesotho and Ghana by April next year.

Sustainability Key to Wooing Millennials, Gen Z Customers

According to U.K.-based FinTech firm Twig, nearly 60% of millennial and Gen Z consumers already consider the resale value of an item at the time of purchase.

For more than 30% of these young consumers, reselling old items to fund new lifestyle goods is their go-to shopping method.

To build on this growing trend, Twig has gone beyond the average banking services offered by FinTech firms to give young consumers the chance to cash out and offload fashion and electronic products they no longer want and get an instant valuation for them.

“If you’re happy with the price, you can simply swipe right, and money moves into your account immediately before you even ship the items. [We’ve made] it as easy for someone to convert an iPhone 11 Pro to dollars as it is to convert pounds to dollars,” Geri Cupi, the London-based firm’s CEO, said in an interview with PYMNTS.