Bokadirekt and Trustly have partnered to enable instant payouts for beauty salons in Sweden.
The collaboration adds Trustly’s payment infrastructure to Bokadirekt’s booking platform for health and beauty treatments and services, the companies said in a Tuesday (Feb. 21) press release.
“Providing the best payment experience for our merchants and customers is a key part of our long-term strategy,” Bokadirekt Head of Business Development Gustaf Tunhammar said in the release.
PYMNTS research has found that salons, spas, health clubs and other beauty and wellness merchants have leveraged digital tools to improve engagement, reduce friction and better understand and serve their clients.
Increasingly, consumers are looking online for their beauty and wellness purchases, with 12% saying they did so more in 2021 than they did at the start of the pandemic in 2020, according to the “Beauty and Wellness Digital Payments Tracker®,” a PYMNTS and American Express collaboration.
That makes staying at the forefront of digital trends and capabilities essential for merchants in an industry where much of their competition already embraces digital payment solutions and other digital advances, the report said.
By leveraging Trustly’s digital account-to-account (A2A) platform, Bokadirekt can offer its clients instant payouts, which improves the merchants’ liquidity and level of comfort. In addition, Bokadirekt gains efficiency from a fully automated payment submitting process, according to the release.
With the ability to process instant payouts — rather than being limited by bank day cut-off times — Bokadirekt’s merchants can receive funds from consumers faster than the one to three business days they have had to wait previously, the release said.
“We have used our payment infrastructure to enable a technical solution in which over 20,000 beauty and health service providers across Sweden are able to receive payments for their services instantly,” Trustly Chief Commercial Officer Olof Wirfelt said in the release. “We believe this shows the advantages of Trustly’s fast and secure solutions while empowering the connected merchants of Bokadirekt.”
The stars are aligning for open banking payments to become an ever-clearer alternative to cards, especially as debit is a preferred payment method in Europe, Trustly CEO Alex Gonthier told PYMNTS’ Karen Webster in an interview posted in November.
“Pay-by-bank is just a question of connectivity, online, over the internet — it works anywhere,” Gonthier said at the time.
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