Plaid and Mollie partner to improve onboarding for merchants

The shift to online spending in Europe is rising at a dramatic pace. According to a Plaid survey, nearly 60% of Europeans, 424.5 million, now use ecommerce services, and one in three consumers in the UK do at least 80% of their spending digitally, 

As a result, merchants are optimising their consumer payment experiences – in-person, online, and mobile – to keep satisfied. 

Plaid has recently announced that it is adding Mollie, one of Europe’s fastest growing payment service providers, to its Payment Partner Ecosystem. 

Mollie will leverage Plaid’s API to deliver a more secure and easier bank verification experience for merchants during their onboarding. This will make it easier and faster for Mollie’s customers to start receiving payments and open digital storefronts across Europe.

Unlocking the value of open banking 

Founded in 2013, Plaid builds data transfer networks that aim to empower financial and digital finance products. 

Based in San Francisco, California, the fintech is rapidly expanding across Europe, and builds the infrastructure and APIs to help companies harness the open banking opportunity. The integration with Plaid aims to strengthen Mollie’s position as a leading innovator, being one of the first payment service providers to offer this highly local and seamless bank account verification method. It’s part of Mollie’s commitment to help SMEs grow their business in Europe amid a thriving ecommerce landscape. 

“With the pandemic, Europe and much of the world experienced two years of intense financial digitisation, creating huge opportunities for businesses to serve customers in new ways. Embedding Plaid solutions into payment service providers like Mollie unlocks the power of open banking for thousands of merchants with significantly less time and fewer resources required to deploy and manage,” said Farid Sedjelmaci, head of European partnerships at Plaid.

With more payments going digital and commerce moving borderless, the opportunity for open banking to make that process faster, easier, and less costly increases with it.

Expanding to grow the customer base

According to Mollie, it onboards thousands of merchants on a monthly basis. Currently, the process involves multiple checks of identity and bank account ownership. Through the partnership, Plaid’s open banking data network is connected directly into Mollie’s platform. As a result, Mollie can validate bank account ownership in real-time and merchants can get their digital storefronts open and ready to accept payments more easily across Europe. 

Rogier Schoute, Chief Product Officer at Mollie, said: “Our customers are at the heart of our business and we are constantly improving and striving to offer the best payments experiences. Plaid shares this same philosophy with us and creates exceptional products. We’re particularly excited because the partnership will allow us to offer our customers a fantastic solution to facilitate quick and easy onboarding, not only the first time they join Mollie, but also as they grow their business abroad. Gone are the days of the overcomplicated verification method.”

The implementation of Plaid’s open banking solutions will start in the UK, with further European markets to follow in the upcoming months, including France and Germany. Mollie is currently also exploring the use cases of open banking for payments and other financial services to add further value for its B2B customers.