LINK Mobility Group ASA, Europe’s leading provider of mobile messaging and solutions has entered into a partnership agreement with Norwegian payment integration provider BankBridge to deliver Europe’s first mobile account-to-account service for both public and private organisations issuing mobile invoices to customers.
The service will be launched during 2018/19 across LINK Mobility’s entire European footprint, a total of 14 European Markets including Norway, Germany, Spain, Sweden and Denmark. The service will run independently from third party payment schemes and will involve no interchange fees. The partnership will enable enterprises to collect payments from their customers through LINK Mobility´s messaging channels and receive payment directly from the account of the user, cutting out the layer added by other third parties.
LINK Mobility provides the mobile messaging communication solutions, while BankBridge provides the payment infrastructure in the form of a unique integration architecture that includes a fully PSD2 compliant, unified API. The API enables the instant exchange of bank-to-bank information and related actions.
“This agreement marks the beginning of account-to-account payments delivered independently from the payment schemes and therefore excludes interchange fees. We are delighted to be part of this groundbreaking service that provides consumers in Europe – and ultimately across the world – with a smoother and more convenient way to pay for goods or services via the mobile,” said Christoffer Andvig, CEO of BankBridge.
“This is an exciting development and partnership enabling LINK to add more innovation and efficiency into our mobile payment offering, allowing our enterprise customers to strengthen their own interaction with their customers when invoicing their services via the mobile. The mobile will become the preferred channel for interaction between consumers and enterprises. Mobile payment solutions naturally embedded in the mobile messaging interaction is the way of the future. We consumers want to do as much as possible via the mobile; cancel appointments, pay for parcels upon delivery, pay for subscriptions and plenty more and we want to do this at a time and context that is convenient to us. LINK aims to be the forefront in Europe enabling our enterprise customers to take advantage of all the innovation within mobile payment solutions. LINK has a growing number of customers utilising our current services to send payment reminders or collecting payments. With the option of enabling BankBridge’s account-to-account services, the power of the mobile messaging channel and simplicity of mobile based payments really will show its potential for our European enterprise customers,” said Arild Hustad, Group CEO of LINK Mobility.
