Open partners with Visa to enhance business banking for SMEs

Fintech start-up Open, which offers a business banking service for SMEs and start-ups in partnership with banks, have announced a strategic partnership with Visa - the global leader in payments technology - to enhance their business banking proposition for SMEs.

The partnership will enable Open to launch a suite of products that includes a business credit card for SMEs, payment gateway acquiring and real time payments.

The business card from Open will be a first-of-its-kind card specifically designed to help start-ups qualify based on funding rather than credit history. The card comes with a suite of expense management tools that will help businesses manage their expenses and payouts and can be issued to employees, set limits and comes integrated with Whatsapp for seamless expense filing.

The credit card also comes with a reward program that lets start-ups earn points for their spend which can be redeemed for various software subscriptions, cloud hosting and discounts on co-working spaces.

Apart from the business card, the partnership with Visa will enable Open to enhance the Open API banking suite called Layer through features like real time payments settlement and refunds.

Layer is a programmable bank account for developers to integrate banking into their business and product flows. The current account comes integrated with an developer friendly payment gateway with features like tokenization, real time payment settlements and instant refunds.

Commenting on this partnership, Anish Achuthan Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Open said: "This partnership will enable Open to leverage the leadership and expertise Visa have in the payments space to co-create and innovate new solutions on credit, expense management and payment processing for small businesses."

T.R. Ramachandran, Group Country Manager India and South Asia Visa, said: "The partnership with Open will allow us and our banking partners to empower small businesses by enabling safe, reliable and convenient payment experiences for them."

Open Financial Technologies Pvt Ltd (www.bankopen.co) is an SME-focussed neo-banking platform. Founded in 2017, Open is a growing SME neo-banking platforms globally with over 1,00,000 SMEs, processing over $5billion (Rs 35,000 crore) in transaction processing volume annually and adding 20,000 new SMEs every month.

( With inputs from IANS )