Paytrail empowers millions of open finance payments with Mastercard

Based in Finland, Paytrail is the largest domestic online payment service in terms of payment volume.  

Powered by Mastercard (through the Aiia acquisition), Paytrail enables ecommerce for more than 20,000 merchants and online shoppers, providing greater choice with new payment options and providing a more hassle-free online checkout experience.  

We sat down with Paytrail’s Chief Operating Officer, Joni Rautanen, to talk about how they’re using open banking to power checkout solutions in Finland, as well as the results of the fruitful collaboration.

With a desire to be the first ecommerce player in the market to offer open banking solutions, Paytrail has been working with Aiia, now a Mastercard company since 2019. 

Today,  Paytrail  and Mastercard  are enabling more than one million open banking payments every month. Commenting on the great results, Paytrail’s Chief Operating Officer, Joni Rautanen, says:

"We looked for an open banking platform with a strong team and a desire to take things in a new way. In retrospect, it can be said that this was a success."

Unlike more traditional payment options, open banking allows anyone with a bank account to initiate swift and secure digital payments which arrive as soon as technically possible and in some countries almost immediately to a retailer’s account.

Compared to other methods, this solution requires fewer steps to complete a payment, as the payment is initiated directly from the bank without the need to manually fill in payment details or switch between applications or interfaces.  

Through this collaboration, merchants can also offer a solution that is fully integrated in the checkout environment and aligns with Paytrail’s and Mastercard’s shared vision of continuously increasing convenience for consumers and enhancing security.

"Without the cooperation, we would have had to build the interface integration with the banks ourselves and it would have been a very challenging task. The simple integration with Aiia [now acquired by Mastercard] has enabled us to get the solution up and running fast to offer thousands of merchants the opportunity to leverage open banking powered payments," explains Joni Rautanen.

By enabling a faster checkout process that requires less effort, there’s no doubt that core features of open finance ecommerce payments are convenient for consumers.

Open finance providers reduce the steps of a transaction down to simply redirecting a consumer to their bank to authenticate the transaction for example by pre-populating the merchant’s payment details. 

Commenting on the increased focus on user experience, Katharina Luschnik, Vice President, Product Sales of Aiia, a Mastercard company, says:

“Open finance ecommerce payments are convenient for consumers as they enable a faster checkout process, paying through an interface that the consumer trusts with their bank. The flow itself holds embedded SCA (Strong Customer Authentication) and therefore reduces steps in successfully getting a transaction through when shopping online,” she says and emphasizes: 

“Paytrail is a perfect example of a payment service provider that is leading the change for a best-in-class online shopping experience and fitting their solution towards customer demands. We’re thrilled to empower Paytrail on their future journey towards increasing convenience in the eCommerce landscape,” she concludes.