Open Banking platform Yapily has rolled out Yapily Virtual Accounts to bring more transparency to real-time payments, according to the official press release. Yapily Virtual Accounts enables merchants and payment service providers (PSPs) to create multiple accounts to collect local payments, initiate instant payouts and refunds, and improve reconciliation – all through a single API.

Yapily’s new product meets the needs of both the merchants using the product directly and the PSPs enabling this solution for their merchant customers. Findexiq, a disruptive payments platform, will be Yapily’s first customer to integrate the new product. Greater visibility over payment status, more control over the distribution and flow of funds, and reduced costs when it comes to accepting and transferring cross-border payments are just a few of the benefits Findexiq are set to realise through Yapily Virtual Accounts.

As a result, its merchant customers will be able to focus more resources on expanding globally whilst saving both time and money. Managing payments when doing business internationally presents a challenge for merchants. Often, the end-customer is charged with an international payment fee and receives non-competitive rates when paying an invoice in a different currency from their own.

What’s more, lengthy settlement times are leaving merchants waiting for their money and the end-customer waiting for the delivery of their goods and services. Yapily Virtual Accounts seek to help merchants in the UK and Europe accept domestic payments in GBP and EUR instantly, improving the customer experience whilst avoiding high international payment collection fees. Besides this one, Yapily Virtual Accounts has other use cases, including the ability to collect payments from any payment method, split funds to deduct fees prior to settlement, and fulfil refunds instantly.

The expansion to Yapily’s product suite follows its launch of Variable Recurring Payments earlier in August 2022. It also follows Yapily’s agreement to acquire FinAPI in May 2022. With almost 2,000 bank integrations across 18 countries today, the fintech scale-up continues to expand to new geographies and deepen its coverage across Europe.

Virtual Accounts 101 A virtual account is a digital bank account that can be used to accept and make electronic payments (e-money). Yapily is offering its customers the ability to operate their own virtual accounts and to issue accounts to their own clients. Yapily Virtual Accounts allows customers to hold multi-currency accounts that can be used to collect funds and make instant payouts.

It offers a variety of features that can be used to power the customers’ payment processing including the handling of FX, refunds, reconciliation, and settlement. Why are Virtual Accounts important? Yapily’s new product offering will reportedly help to unlock new Open Banking payments use cases and remove friction from the payments journey, accelerating the adoption of Open Banking payments as an alternative to cards as a result. According to Yapily’s Chief Product Officer, until now, Open Banking payments have been primarily focused on payment collection, fueling growth for single payment use cases such as account top-ups.

This launch is meant to help Yapily’s customers to unlock new use cases and growth opportunities. .