Open Payments Gateway Volt Charges Forward with DECTA Partnership

Volt says its platform allows DECTA customers to process online transactions between accounts held at more than 5,000 banks across the UK and Europe

Open payments gateway Volt made a new partnership last week with payment processing firm DECTA to provide customers from 70+ markets – including banks, merchants, online payment service providers (PSPs) and fintechs – with a portal to open banking architecture. 

Volt says its platform allows DECTA customers to process online transactions between accounts held at more than 5,000 banks across the UK and Europe. Volt adds that it helps reduce card fraud and removes the chargeback process to create a “unified checkout experience” – via one integration.

Santa Kirsbauma, Board Member, Product Offering at DECTA, says: “Open banking is gaining velocity across the industry, so when Volt’s open banking platform crossed our path, we immediately opened a dialogue.”

Jordan Lawrence, CCO at Volt, cited stats from MerchantSavvy that showed card fraud tripled globally from $9.84 billion (£7.2 billion) in 2011 to $32.39 billion (£23.7 billion) in 2020.

DECTA was founded in 2015 and is based in London. It provides payment card issuing and acquiring services, and has its own in-house processing centre and a proprietary payment gateway. Clients on its website include Novatti, Paysend and TeslaPay.

Last month DECTA made a partnership with myMoney in the UK. It seems everybody in the payments sector likes to keep it friendly and cosy. MyMoney will play the role of a payment facilitator for UK-based merchants, enabling them to accept payments via various payment methods such as Visa, Mastercard, WeChat Pay and Alipay. DECTA joins the partnership as an acquiring bank and powers the technical side of the solution for Visa and Mastercard payments.

Volt was established in 2019 and is also headquartered in London. It has been keeping busy as earlier this month it revealed a partnership with MoneyMatrix – a Malta-founded iGaming-focused payments gateway. Prior to that in May, it made a partnership with Vienna-based payment orchestration platform IXOPAY. This deal gives IXOPAY’s merchant clients another option to accept PSD2-compliant open banking payments through its payment orchestration platform.

In June, Volt raised a $23.5 million Series A to fund expansion into new territories and build out its global instant payments footprint. The investment round, “the largest Series A on record for the open banking industry”, was led by EQT Ventures. Existing investors Augmentum Fintech and Fuel Ventures also participated in the round, alongside several angel investors. These include Robert Kraal as Chairman (co-founder of Adyen) and Gabriel de Montessus as Non-Executive Director (Group President at FIS Worldpay).

Understanding Open Banking and the Statistics

As Kirsbauma mentioned above, open banking is “gaining velocity”.

Investopedia describes open banking as “a banking practice that provides third-party financial service providers open access to consumer banking, transaction, and other financial data from banks and non-bank financial institutions through the use of application programming interfaces (APIs)”.

There are risks of course. For instance, Investopedia believes “much broader concerns would simply be data breaches due to poor security, hacking, or insider threats that have become relatively widespread in the modern era”.

In the UK, the Open Banking Implementation Entity (OBIE) was officially set up by the Competition and Markets Authority in 2016 to create technology (APIs), data standards and the governance structures enabling the country to implement open banking. The aim of this regulation was to increase competition and choice for consumers and small businesses.

The legislation that enabled open banking in the UK took effect on 13 January 2018, when PSD2 came into effect.

In OBIE’s July 2021 stats, there were 325 regulated providers made up of 234 third party providers and 91 account providers, with 114 regulated entities that have at least one proposition live with customers.

OBIE also points out that more than 2.5 million UK consumers and businesses now use open banking-enabled products to manage their finances, access credit and make payments. By way of comparison, there were one million users in January 2020 and two million in August 2020.

Users are not automatically opted in to open banking. They will only use open banking if they give their explicit consent to a regulated app or website.

API call volume has increased from 66.8 million in 2018 to 5.8 billion in 2020. Cumulatively, API call volumes reached over seven billion between 2018 and 2020. 320,000 open banking payments were made in 2018, and this has subsequently risen to over four million in 2020. The first business loan using open banking data was issued in November 2018.

OBIE’s trading name is Open Banking Limited. OBIE is governed by the CMA and funded by the CMA9 (Allied Irish Bank, Bank of Ireland, Barclays, Danske, HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group, Nationwide, RBS Group and Santander). It works with the CMA 9, as well as challenger banks, financial technology companies, third party providers and consumer groups.

Antony Peyton
Antony Peyton
Antony Peyton is the Editor of eWeek UK. He has 18 years' journalism and writing experience. His career has taken him to China, Japan and the UK - covering tech, fintech and business. Follow on Twitter @TonyFintech.
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