Business Spending Tool Pleo Taps Yapily for Open Banking Payments

• Small business spending solution Pleo and open banking provider Yapily have formed a partnership.
• Under the agreement, Pleo will leverage Yapily Payments to enable account-to-account payments for its small business clients.
• Pleo will begin rolling out the new service to its business clients in the Netherlands and France in the coming months.

Small business spending solution Pleo has teamed up with open banking provider Yapily this week.

Pleo is leveraging Yapily Payments, a tool that enables direct account-to-account payments. And because Yapily uses open banking, it does not use card rails, which ultimately cuts out middlemen and limits fees. Yapily covers 19 countries and has more than 1900 institutions integrated with its open banking infrastructure.

Pleo was founded in 2015 and enables small businesses to tackle invoices, issue reimbursements, give their employees payment cards for work-related expenses. The company’s spending solution offers small businesses control over employee spend and provides visibility into their expenses.

Yapily Payments will enable Pleo users to top up their Pleo account directly from their bank account. This direct connection offers two major benefits– it offers instant payments and decreases the risk of card fraud and human error. “Manual processes, settlement periods, and bottlenecks in cash flow are all avoidable obstacles,” said Pleo Chief Product Officer Olov Eriksson. “We want to enable our users to focus on what really matters: growing their business and empowering their people.”

Pleo will begin offering customers the new capability in a gradual rollout “over the coming months.” The service will be made available starting in the Netherlands and France. The bank account to-up capability is just the start of Pleo’s partnership with Yapily. Pleo also plans to leverage more of Yapily’s payments solutions in the future.

Yapily was founded in 2017 and offers API-based tools to enable the connection between banks and third party fintechs. Last month, the U.K.-based company launched Variable Recurring Payments, a tool that allows merchants and service providers to offer recurring payments of varying amounts without having to re-authenticate for each transaction.

Photo by Ketut Subiyanto