Nuvei and Plaid Team to Expand Pay-by-Bank

FinTechs Nuvei and Plaid say they are expanding their partnership into new areas.

Their aim is to help a wider range of companies accept bank-based payments for multiple uses such as recurring payments and payouts, and to serve new eCommerce verticals like utilities and B2B.

“We want to support merchants with payment solutions with lower processing costs and quicker access to funds,” Nuvei CEO Philip Fayer said in a Tuesday (July 18) press release. “Consumers are increasingly turning to online bank transfer payments, but their user experience has often been poor.”

He added that his company’s instant bank transfer tool, coupled with Plaid’s data network, will make online bank transfers even easier for millions of American consumers.

According to the release, Plaid and Nuvei plan to scale their partnership worldwide by year’s end. Nuvei offers local acquiring in 47 markets while Plaid’s network covers 12,000 financial institutions across the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Europe.

Together, the companies said, they can help businesses across the globe “enhance their online checkout through offering best-in-class, pay-by-bank experiences.”

As PYMNTS noted in a recent interview with Keith Olson, vice president of ACH and Online Banking at Nuvei, consumers like pay-by-bank, also known as account-to-account (A2A) payments, and companies like Uber and Airbnb are responding accordingly.

A2A payments use ACH rails and thus avoid credit card interchange fees, which means businesses are also fans of this method. However, those fees are what pay for credit card reward programs for larger issuers, so rewards programs around A2A payments need to be crafted using a different structure.

“I’ve been in the payment space for decades, and there’s never been a day whereby there hasn’t been frustration over the cost of acceptance and ever-increasing network fees broadly. With that saving [of interchange and network fees] comes the opportunity to reward,” Olson told PYMNTS last month.

An increasing percentage of consumers using A2A as a payment method would like to see this option added, according to the study “New Payment Options: Building Stronger Customer Ties With Pay-By-Bank Transfer.”

That study showed that 52% of bridge millennials and 50% of millennials reported that they would be very likely to use online bank transfers to earn rewards, while 45% of those surveyed said they were most interested in cash-back rewards from A2A use.