OBP has become an increasingly important topic in the industry. The ability to bring account-to-account payments into a range of workflows can bring new sources of value and disruption to several areas, not least digital commerce. At the same time, OBP also creates opportunities for banks to generate new revenues and enjoy cost efficiencies.
NatWest launched its own OBP service aimed at commercial customers—Payit—in 2020 and won a Celent Model Bank Award for the initiative. The bank has made significant enhancements to the service in 2021 that merit further recognition, including a refund service in which the merchant does not need to know the account details of the recipient, and the launch of collecting payments by request. The latter enables business customers to create a payment request that can be shared by either a link or a QR code and extends the reach of Payit into several new use cases. In addition, NatWest has launched an OBP service to support its retail customers: PayMe – Ask for payment. This feature is embedded in theNatWest and Royal Bank of Scotland personal banking apps and can therefore support person to person (P2P) transactions for the bank’s eight million app users.
NatWest is a strong example for other banks to follow in using open banking to strengthen its payment services and is a worthy winner of the Model Bank 2022 Award for Open Banking.
