Fintech TrueLayer, which claims to be one of Europe’s most prominent open banking payments network, has teamed up with Ryanair, Europe’s largest airline group.
This collaboration is now live and represents a key milestone for both TrueLayer and Ryanair.
Ryanair customers are now able to use Pay by Bank when booking flights, offering a “faster, more secure” and frictionless payment experience.
It comes as TrueLayer continues to expand within the digital commerce sector, having also recently gone live on some of Europe’s largest ecommerce sites such as brands like Just Eat Takeaway and Lastminute.com.
In addition to being “faster” and more secure, Pay by Bank is also much cheaper for merchants, meaning Ryanair can reportedly “save millions of pounds” if customers Pay by Bank instead of through traditional card payments.
The addition of Pay by Bank also enhances checkout reliance.
This proved invaluable during the CrowdStrike outage, which left travel operators “unable to process card payments and caused global losses of over £4 billion.”
Meanwhile, merchants offering Pay by Bank continued “receiving payments seamlessly.”
As mentioned in the update shared with CI, open banking payments adoption is rapidly growing,
UK Pay by Bank payments have tripled, “to 21 million in the past 2 years.”
The UK Government also recently outlined its objective to “make this form of payment ubiquitous in the UK.”
As covered last month, Truelayer, which was once a Fintech Unicorn (valued at over $1 billion), has made the decision to cut around a quarter of its workforce.
This appears to part of Truelayer’s overall business strategy to substantially lower costs and attempt to move towards profitability in order to meet investors’ expectations.
The London-headquartered Fintech has laid off 71 workers at the end of September, only a week prior to reporting a substantial $50 million round that saw its valuation drop, according to sources familiar with the matter.
Sources also claimed that workers had been given a 2-hour notice for a meeting where they were told that there would be job cuts.
The impacted TrueLayer employees reportedly exited the firm on the same day.
Another source also claimed that about 25% of the workforce had been impacted by this move.
A Truelayer representative stated that their recent funding round was considered to be “another vote of confidence” in the business.
The rep also noted that at the same time, they share important steps to chart the path toward profitability, including “streamlining operational costs and a reduction in headcount which took place in September.”
The investment round resulted in Truelayer’s valuation being reduced by around 30%, thus leading to the company losing its Unicorn status, which it was able to attain back in a 2021 funding round (with a valuation exceeding of well over $1 billion).