The collaborations are designed to help Sage as it develops financial services for small businesses in Europe, per the release. Mastercard will act as Sage’s card network partner to support debit card capabilities, and Adyen will provide banking-as-a-service infrastructure and onboarding.
“Across Europe, small businesses are running their finances across a growing number of tools,” the release said. “Accounting software is now one part of a wider financial stack, and new eInvoicing and digital reporting requirements are arriving market by market. Sage is developing services that bring banking, payments and reconciliation into the software small businesses already use, starting with France and expanding across its European markets.”
European small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) use an average of five digital business tools on average, and 70% said integrated tools are crucial to their business, according to Mastercard research cited in the release.
Sage’s new offering will let customers “make payments, manage company spending using debit cards and keep banking activity connected with their accounting in Sage,” the release said. The idea is to complement customers’ banking relationships, not replace them.
“Small businesses shouldn’t have to move between separate systems to manage their finances,” Sage Chief Commercial Officer Derk Bleeker said in the release. “We’re developing services that bring more of those everyday activities into the software they already use to run their business. This is the first implementation of our broader European banking-as-a-service strategy and an important step in helping customers manage more of their financial activity through Sage.”
The PYMNTS Intelligence report “Ready for Change: Why Nearly Half of SMBs Want to Ditch Cash and Checks,” a collaboration with Mastercard, found in February that SMBs want better digital tools, with 46% saying they would pay more to access them.
“Small businesses want tools that give them more control over when money moves, how spending gets tracked and what happens when a payment goes wrong,” PYMNTS reported July 16, citing the report.
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