- E-commerce benefits in many ways from new pan-European payment methods such as SEPA Request-to-pay
- High interest, especially among younger people
Munich, 14 November 2023. The SEPA Request-to-pay (R2P) function, which allows users to pay for online purchases in their bank’s banking app, is of great interest to consumers: 54.3% would use it to pay if it were available in their online or mobile banking. This is shown by a recent YouGov survey* commissioned by Gini, one of the leading companies for innovative payment solutions.
One in five respondents (20.9 percent) would even be prepared to replace their preferred payment method or provider.
Younger respondents are more interested in a payment option offered directly through the banking app than older respondents: One in three 18-34-year-olds (33.4 percent) would use it to completely replace their preferred payment method, compared to one in eight over 55-year-olds (12.5 percent). The capabilities offered by SEPA Request-to-pay are therefore an alternative to third-party payment solutions.
SEPA Request-to-pay, which banks and savings banks can integrate into their banking apps, is a payment initiation system that is valid throughout the SEPA area and allows online retailers, for example, to send payment requests to their customers. These are sent directly to the buyer in their preferred mobile banking app and can be paid immediately or later, depending on the merchant’s wishes. The benefit is that the buyer receives a pre-formatted, completed, and digital payment request that triggers a payment as soon as it is confirmed. For the merchant, this also guarantees 100% payment allocation to the order.
Paying with the banking app offers many benefits for e-commerce and consumers.
Many consumers currently use third-party payment solutions, some from outside the EU. For e-commerce, this means additional fees and even abandoned purchases if the customer’s preferred solution is not offered. SEPA Request-to-pay enables account-to-account payments, where shoppers can connect directly to their trusted house bank via the relevant mobile banking app and see all account transactions at a glance. All data is available in the banking app, which significantly increases the transparency of payments for the user.
Using the SEPA Request-to-pay function, payments can be sent to and approved in the banking app and executed via a normal or real-time SEPA transfer. The payment process for the customer is, therefore, much faster and smoother than a traditional invoice transfer.
The invoice receipt is sent directly together with the payment request and is thus delivered to the customer, i.e., the debtor, in paperless form. This significantly increases invoicing efficiency and simplifies bureaucratic processes for online merchants.
The integration effort for SEPA R2P remains low, as online merchants can integrate it via APIs or Gini’s plugin for native applications (SDK). This keeps the entire integration process simple and cost-effective.
“The functionality of SEPA Request-to-pay, which is directly integrated into the mobile banking apps of banks and savings banks as a payment option, makes the payment process much easier and smoother for both online merchants and customers,” says Holger Teske, CEO of Gini. “E-commerce benefits from a cost-effective solution that will make third-party integration obsolete in the near future”.
*The data used is based on an online survey conducted by YouGov Deutschland GmbH on behalf of Gini, in which 2,129 people took part between 17 and 22 October 2023. The results were weighted and represent the German population aged 18 and over.
