Milan and London, June 2nd 2016 – SIA, a company specializing in the management of electronic payments, and Raphaels Bank, an issuing bank recognised for enabling innovation in payments, have signed a partnership agreement for the development and launch of payment solutions in the UK and across Europe.
As part of the agreement, Raphaels and SIA will offer SEPA payments services to clients through the Bank’s indirect participation in the SEPA Credit Transfer and SEPA Direct Debit schemes.
This will allow both UK and European businesses to access STEP2, EBA Clearing’s pan-European technology infrastructure for retail payments in euro managed by SIA. It currently processes over 40 million operations per day on average and more than 4,800 financial institutions in 34 European countries are reachable.
The partnership will also strengthen SIA and Raphaels’ positions in the prepaid cards market. SIA currently processes 3.3 billion card transactions and manages over 65 million payment cards in 16 European countries, whilst Raphaels settles over £6bn annually across its portfolio of prepaid, credit and debit cards.
In the mobile payments sphere, SIA will enable Raphaels, a principal member of Visa and MasterCard®, to offer contactless payments on smartphones through its “SIA EasyPay” platform. It supports both SIM-based and Host Card Emulation (HCE) technology and represents an important step forward in simplifying access to mobile payments.