SumUp Selects Form3 for Access to UK Faster Payments Scheme

SumUp has partnered with Form3 to enhance its business account offering for United Kingdom customers.

With this move, SumUp, a global FinTech that serves 4 million small businesses in 35 markets worldwide, will gain direct access to the U.K. Faster Payments Scheme (FPS) and Bacs Scheme, the companies said in a Wednesday (July 5) press release.

This will be provided by Form3’s cloud-native account-to-account (A2A) payments platform, according to the release.

“Form3’s established reputation in the market, proven operational resiliency and ability to scale with our growth plans made them our chosen partner,” SumUp Head of Business Operations Banking Tribe David Tatarishvilli said in the release. “As a platform, Form3 can also help us break into new markets and create new payments offerings, so we are very excited about what the future holds.”

The partnership will include SumUp connecting to the Form3 platform via a single application programming interface (API), Form3 managing the payment processing and Barclays providing scheme settlement with the Bank of England on SumUp’s behalf, according to the release.

This arrangement will allow SumUp to scale, reduce its total processing costs and future-proof itself against the potential impact of mandatory scheme and regulatory changes, the release said.

“SumUp is a major name in mobile point of sale and our core values very much align; a tech-first approach to payments with a primary goal of delighting customers,” Form3 CEO Michael Mueller said in the release. “We are very pleased to support their expansion and aid their mission to support small and medium businesses which is the lifeblood of the U.K. economy.”

Onboarding and connecting to a proliferating number of real-time payments schemes has become a new challenge for financial institutions and enterprises, Form3 Chief Product Officer Mike Walters told PYMNTS in an interview posted in June.

The dozens of real-time and A2A schemes taking shape around the globe are marked by varying levels of maturity, varying stages of growth and varying rates of growth, Walters said. There’s also a lack of standardization — and it’s a major hurdle — in integrating with different payment schemes.

To address those pain points, Payments-as-a-Service is gaining traction as an approach that can help to anticipate and address changes in regulatory schemes and ease any technical heavy lift that confronts stakeholders, Walters said.