Payment Initiation Improves Expense Management for EU Users

Whether it’s in a restaurant, after a weekend among friends or even among tenants in a shared house, splitting bills and working out how much each person owes can be tedious and manually intensive process, especially when there’s a large number of people involved.

To simplify the process, several expense management platforms have emerged on the market in recent years, offering a seamless way to manage shared expenses quickly and transparently. To attract and retain customers, there have to be differentiating factors that separates one app from the other.

For Jonathan Fallon and Guillebert de Dorlodot, co-founders of Brussels-based group expense management firm Tricount, what sets them apart from other industry players is the neutrality they provide customers when it comes to the banks and financial institutions customers can make payments from.

So while other expense apps may be bound to specific banks or payment systems, Tricount is agnostic: “What we try to do at Tricount is to stay as open and as neutral as possible. You don’t need to be a consumer of bank X to be able to use our platform,” Fallon told PYMNTS in an interview.

Today, the company, which launched in 2010 and is now profitable, has amassed a client base of over 5.2 million registered users across Europe — France, Spain, Germany, Belgium and Italy — allowing them to split bills among group members, categorize expenses by type and reimburse outstanding balances via integrated payment methods.

To further widen the gap between Tricount and its competitors, the Brussels-based startup now allows users — starting in Belgium — to authorize payments in one-click directly from their bank accounts without the need to share IBANs. This is facilitated through an open banking partnership with Mastercard, European licensed digital bank Aion Bank and Vodeno, a cloud-native Banking-as-a-Service provider.

“The [partnership] opportunity connects us to the open banking ecosystem which is made easy in Europe by PSD2 [the revised Payment Services Directive],” Fallon explained, adding that the goal is to fully launch the solution in collaboration with Belgian banks before extending it to its other markets over time.

Related: Virtual Cards Bring Spend Management Into the Digital Age

Beyond Payment Initiation

Even though open banking went into effect across Europe in 2019, it remains a relatively new concept in the region. It also created a number of legal and technical challenges, which, according to Fallon, need to be addressed by FinTechs like Tricount that are venturing into the banking world for the first time.

But despite those hurdles, he said open banking has way more to offer than just payment initiation for expense reimbursement, and there are many other features that it could also enable for users, such as credit offerings.

Fallon used the example of a group of ten travelers who could apply for a Tricount credit loan to cover their airline tickets, and then have the cost split between the group later on in their Tricount account.

See also: Mastercard: Service Spending Making a Comeback

“Those are possibilities that could be offered directly through open banking,” he noted. “It’s not what we do today, but we see that as a first step into a sea of opportunities.”

Moving forward, the co-founders said they will continue to strengthen the app’s social dimension, moving beyond the standard push notification users get when a transaction is created by a group member, to include features that enable comments on transactions and interactions between users in a group.

Alongside that need to expand the social angle of their business, the company will also continue to leverage the PSD2 integration to tap into new opportunities in the expense management space.

As Fallon said: “The social aspect is really for growth and retention, but when it comes to the open banking facet, we think that’s where the business opportunities lie.”

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