Open Banking adoption is continuing across a range of sectors such as the travel industry, with Ryanair the latest to integrate the payment method.
The Irish low-cost airline has partnered with TrueLayer, in a deal that will see the airline utilise London-based TrueLayer’s Pay by Bank product, an Open Banking-based account–to-account payments method.
Airlines like Ryanair are identifying a number of benefits to using Pay by Bank for facilitating customer payments. Firstly is variety, with the use of as many payment methods as possible widening the breadth of potential customers to reach.
“Gen Z likes to travel, even more than the others,” said Sergio Signoretti, Chief Financial Officer, Lastminute.com, an online travel agent, at the Pay360 conference earlier this year, summarising observations of payments preferences in travel.
“They like convenience – it’s very important to be competitive in terms of price and quality ratio. When we talk about convenience it is not just price, the best deals, but also convenience when paying.”
TrueLayer has identified checkout reliance as a key benefit for travel companies by making customers less reliant on debit card payments. Cybersecurity has been highlighted as another area of concern, with the CrowdStrike global computer outage on 19 July causing widespread disruption to both banking and air travel.
As noted above, Pay by Bank has been taking off across a range of sectors and not just travel. In the UK – one of Ryanair’s biggest markets – Open Banking adoption has been increasing steadily year-over-year, with many people now using it for tax payments according to Ecospend, an Open Banking firm which is partnered with the HMRC tax office.
Companies like TrueLayer, as well as others like Truslty (which owns the above-mentioned Ecospend) have been enjoying considerable success from this. TrueLayer states that it gains a new customer every three seconds and that it has processed half a million sales in Pay by Bank on food delivery service JustEat since the duo’s partnership went live in October.
Francesco Simoneschi, Founder and CEO of TrueLayer, said on LinkedIn: “This is a major milestone for Pay by Bank in the ecommerce space, and brings us closer to Pay by Bank becoming a ubiquitous payment method, as envisioned in the National Payments Vision.
“A huge thank you to the amazing Ryanair team for their partnership in making this happen. It’s clear why Ryanair is a global success story, given how quickly they embrace innovation that benefits their customers.”
With Pay by Bank payments already extensive in the UK – having tripped to 21 million over the past three years – partnerships like this will be music to the ears of the government, which is actively trying to encourage more widespread adoption of Open Banking payments.
The government views Open Banking as critical to the long-term future of the country’s financial services sector, a sector which it in turn sees as critical to the UK’s long-term economic growth, as outlined in its National Payments Vision unveiled last month.
Ensuring interoperability across multiple sectors from finance to energy to travel to produce is an important task, however, and not an easy one. Concerns about customer willingness to share data have been raised in some sectors such as betting, where Open Banking is being touted as an ideal solution to the industry’s customer affordability issue.
