A partnership between Starling Bank and mobile card reader specialist SumUp will enable faster transaction settlements for small businesses in the UK.
The UK challenger bank will provide the fellow start-up with access to its Starling Banking Services infrastructure, which will facilitate speedy next-day payments for merchants using SumUp devices for point-of-sale transactions.
SumUp provides mobile card payment terminals to businesses across Europe, giving them greater flexibility in how they choose to accept card payments from customers.
Starling’s head of banking Helen Bierton said: “Small businesses are the lifeblood of an innovative and entrepreneurial ecosystem, so making sure they can receive the rewards of their hard work is incredibly important.
“Our partnership with SumUp means that whether a small merchant is serving coffee or cutting hair, we are helping to ensure they get paid as quickly as possible so they can get on with growing their businesses.”
Starling will help merchants using a SumUp reader to access faster payments
Starling has recently focused a lot of attention on banking services for business, following a £100m grant awarded earlier this year by the Capability and Innovation fund to boost competition within UK financial services for SMEs.
This latest collaboration will expand its reach into the business banking market by integrating its own payments infrastructure and banking offering with SumUp and its merchants via an application programming interface (API).
The challenger bank was an early fintech addition to the Faster Payments Service, a UK initiative designed to improve payment speeds between bank accounts, and its API-based banking proposition will give users real-time access to the scheme.
SumUp provides card terminals to more than 1.5 million businesses globally, which can use the devices either with or without a connected mobile app.
The firm’s vice president of banking and acquiring Dimitri Gugunava said: “We always look for new ways to improve the services we offer our merchants on a journey of empowering them to succeed while doing what they love.
“Quicker payouts are an important step which we were able to take through our partnership with Starling Bank.”
Starling Bank introduces multi-owner business accounts
Last week, Starling announced further developments in its banking proposition for UK businesses, by introducing multi-owner business accounts to customers.
It currently counts about 60,000 business banking customers among its ranks, and cited high demand from companies with more than one “person of significant control” (PSC) behind the new launch.
CEO Anne Boden said: “Opening up our business account to SMEs with more than one PSC will give hundreds of thousands more companies access to our features.
“This means they can manage their finances conveniently on their smartphone without having to worry about where their nearest bank branch is and when it will be open.”
