Trustly Completes Ecospend Acquisition to Grow Open Banking in UK

Trustly has closed its acquisition of Ecospend to grow its offerings in the United Kingdom.

The acquisition brings together Trustly’s global payments platform for digital account-to-account (A2A) transactions and Ecospend’s payment initiation services and data services, Trustly said in a Friday (Jan. 27) press release.

“This is an important milestone and is fully in line with Trustly’s ambitious target to be the game-changing market leader in the U.K.,” Trustly Group CEO Johan Tjärnberg said in the release. “We can’t wait to continue our expansion journey as a collective team, bringing best-in-class open banking solutions to both consumers and merchants.”

The acquisition was announced in May 2022, at which time it was pending regulatory approvals, and Trustly said that the deal would enable it to breach a huge market for its services in the U.K.

Pay by Bank is ready to cement its place as an alternative to credit cards, Alex Gonthier, CEO of Trustly Inc., the North American division of Trustly Group, told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster in an interview posted in November 2022.

Certain verticals are proving to be notably strong markets for Pay by Bank. These include sports betting, where card declines tend to be relatively higher than other verticals; the enterprise segment, which is biller oriented, and insurance and tuition payments. Trustly is also setting its sights on eCommerce more fully, Gonthier said at the time.

“For 25 years, I’ve been focused on the same consumer and the same problem: How to pay in a way that’s simple,” Gonthier said. “Pay by Bank is just a question of connectivity, online, over the internet — it works anywhere.”

With the closing of the acquisition, which follows approval by the U.K.’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), Trustly and Ecospend will have connectivity with 80 U.K. banks, 50 million U.K. consumers and 7.5 billion pounds (about $9.3 billion) U.K. payments volume (for 2022).

“The U.K. is the largest digital payments market in Europe and represents a huge opportunity for us,” Ecospend Chief Commercial Officer James Hickman said in the release. “We have seen an incredible appetite from both consumers and businesses to embrace open banking and the simple and secure payments that it enables.”

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