Today in the Connected Economy: Visa Helps Pagaya Expand Financial Access

Today in the connected economy, Pagaya and Visa join forces to provide wider access to Pagaya’s financial products. Plus, Cyril Chiche of Lydia looks to the future of the European super app, and GlobalBees CEO Nitin Agarwal talks about serving as a brand incubator for Indian startups.

Pagaya Partners With Visa for Increased Access to Financial Products

Visa has launched a partnership with artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure platform Pagaya Technologies Ltd. to give Visa’s merchant partner network access to Pagaya’s technology, a move designed to expand customers’ access to financial products.

Pagaya’s proprietary AI technology and infrastructure “enable banks, originators and merchants to offer robust access to financial products through a seamless and white-labeled customer experience,” the companies said in an announcement.

Why Doesn’t Europe Have a Financial Super App?

“Another two years.”

That’s how much time Cyril Chiche, co-founder and CEO of French FinTech unicorn Lydia, thinks it will take for France to stand shoulder to shoulder with the United Kingdom or Ireland, which are currently the top destinations European startup funding.

There’s data to support that outcome. According to Pitchbook, venture capital (VC) investment in French startups doubled in the last year, growing from 5.1 billion euros to over 11 billion euros ($12.5 billion). And while that figure trailed the 26 billion pounds ($35 billion) the U.K.’s tech sector raised in 2021, the quick acceleration in startup funding in France cannot be ignored.

As the Subscription World Churns, Providers Must Get Personal to Avoid the Cut

People have spent the last two years accumulating subscriptions as COVID kept them locked down, and have now begun to evaluate which entertainment options they still need.

This is clear in the highly engaged world of cloud-based gaming, says Trace Galoway, chief strategy officer at Vindicia.

“There’s a couple of things driving this,” Galloway tells PYMNTS. “I think in subscriptions services … you’re seeing a lot more titles out there that are very, very popular. As a parent of a teenager who enjoys online gaming with his friends, there are more and more of the kinds of games he wants to play. More and more of his friends find themselves online in these games, and of course, that drives him to want to go there.

India Emerging as Consumer Brand Incubator with Global Ambitions

The connected economy is fertile soil for promising brands that haven’t yet developed the business knowledge, resources and expertise to establish themselves and scale.

In the U.S., firms like Thrasio are creating impressive portfolios of such small companies and bringing them to market — often with the intention of selling once they’re established.

Meanwhile in India, GlobalBees is building its own portfolio of promising direct-to-consumer (D2C) players.

“We highly focus on creation of the brand rather than sellers on a particular platform,” CEO Nitin Agarwal told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster. “For us, a holistic approach to creating a brand is very, very important. That’s how we like to think ourselves, that’s what we believe in, and that’s the value proposition that we are after.”

Payments Orchestration Smooths LatAm’s Path to Digital Commerce Hub

While Latin America is similar to Europe in that it has dozens of sovereign nations bordering each other, there’s no EU-like organization to deal with trade issues and no single currency, leaving businesses to innovate digital path to commerce between unique markets and cultures.

That’s what makes payments orchestration so important for this environment, helping businesses and consumers connect.

“There are markets or pockets of markets around the world where folks might be worried about pandemic recovery and how it impacts digital commerce, whereas in Latin America, the rocket ship has left the launch bay and it is moving,” Spreedly Vice President of Solution and Success Daniel Scagnelli told PYMNTS, predicting that 2022 will be a year of meaningful change for digital payments in the region.