Merchant Involvement in European Payments Initiative Has Been Less Than Satisfactory

Unlike other European payment service providers, Market Pay has a unique characteristic.

Founded in 2016 by French retail giant Carrefour, the payment platform was designed to support the group’s worldwide omnichannel retail operations, a sector connection that differentiates it from traditional players and competitors in the payments space, according to Frédéric Mazurier, chairman of Market Pay.

“We come from the retail world and that’s something unique, [because] we know how to integrate into the customer journey, [and] we have teams on the product and implementation side tied to retailers that can help our merchants and customers embed the payment solutions in their journey,” Mazurier told PYMNTS in an interview.

And those retail ties run deep, given that Market Pay represents merchants on the Euro Retail Payments Board (ERPB): “Being born out of the retail world [means that] we pretty well know how to defend the interest of merchants,” he added.

Today, the Paris-based firm has expanded beyond France to Belgium, Spain, Italy, Lithuania, Denmark and Brazil, supporting retailers in the deployment of end-to-end support for physical points of sale (PoS) and innovative payment solutions, by leveraging its in-depth knowledge of the retail sector.

The company, which handles 1.3 billion transactions per year while managing 45,000 payment terminals for merchants and five million cards, made its first acquisition in September when it announced that it had closed the buyout of global cloud payments platform, Acoustic Payments, to strengthen its international footprint.

Mazurier said that one of their biggest priorities moving forward is to enrich the omnichannel functionalities that they already have around reimbursements and reaching merchant portals for reconciliation reporting purposes.

Taking the FinTech firm global is another key focus, he added, and “for that, we need to have solutions that have a great value proposition for the market […].”

Contactless: The New Normal

As part of the pandemic-induced shift to digital transactions, Mazurier said the dramatic surge in contactless credit cards and mobile payments across Europe is one of the key trends that has shaped the retail space in the last 18-20 months, which has been helped by regulatory initiatives promoting its use.

At the height of the pandemic last March, the European Union financial watchdog encouraged payment companies to refrain from using cash to help curb the spread of the coronavirus and promote more contactless payments.

Related news: EU Encourages Contactless Payments to Reduce Coronavirus Risk

Mazurier said that was “a strong push” in terms of the development of contactless transactions for low-value and high-value payments in countries where they were already in use, adding that the European Banking Authority (EBA)-led initiative also led to a boom in contactless payments use when those limits were raised from 30 to 50 euros (about $54).

While accelerating the growth of contactless payments, those measures, he said, offered Market Pay new opportunities in terms of acceptance solutions it can provide to merchants, particularly software point-of-sale (SoftPOS).

“I am a firm believer in the development of SoftPOS solutions, which involves transforming a smartphone or a tablet into an acceptance solution, [because] it meets a lot of the requirements of merchants,” Mazurier explained.

Read the interview with Dejamobile CEO: Making Contactless Payments Acceptance Affordable and Flexible for European Merchant

That strong belief fueled the launch of the company’s SoftPOS solution, PayWish, in collaboration with French FinTech leader in mobile and connected equipment payment solutions, Dejamobile, earlier this year.

The tap-on-phone service allows merchants to turn their Android smartphones or tablets into a mobile POS terminal with Dejamobile’s SoftPOS technology, removing the constraints of dedicated physical payment terminals.

To further strengthen the firm’s contactless payment expertise, Market Pay announced the acquisition of Dejamobile in September, a move that Mazurier said “complements the kind of offer and value proposition we would like to give merchants.”

EPI Has Been Less Than Satisfactory

According to Mazurier, contactless payment trends are similar across European markets, but the growth of regional payments is challenged by a fragmented European payment landscape.

Learn more: European Payments Initiative Looking to Topple US FinTechs

The European Payments Initiative (EPI), which is looking to create a pan-European payments system that can take on some of the biggest U.S. FinTechs and payments companies like Mastercard and Visa, could be a solution to that problem, Mazurier noted, helping to establish a more common set of rules and regulations across the region.

Read more: The European Payments Initiative: Laying the Infrastructure for Europe’s Super Payments App

But as much as it is a well-intentioned initiative, Mazurier said they’re not satisfied with the level of merchant involvement in the EPI so far. And had they been more included in discussions, “we would have been able to propose use cases, customer journeys and integrations within the retail feature to make sure this initiative is a success,” he said.

He went on to add that the work done on the EPI since its launch in July 2020 has not been enough to differentiate it from the international schemes it is seeking to compete with. “If it’s only to replicate what has been done by the big international schemes, [then] that will not be enough to make it a success,” he said.