How has the open banking market grown and developed in 2024? What encouraged these changes?
2024 has been a standout year for open banking, but let’s broaden this to account-to-account payments more generally. In the UK, we crossed a huge milestone with 20 million open banking payments processed in a single month, driven by an increasing number of high-profile merchants adding Pay by Bank.
In the EU, the Instant Payments Regulation (IPR) entered into force, mandating SEPA Instant for all PSPs with a clear deadline. This removes some of the current challenges with open-banking payments in the EU, with speed of payment varying bank by bank. Looking around the world, increased competition between FedNow and RTP is driving record numbers of instant payments in the US. In South-East Asia initiatives linking UPI and PromptPay in Thailand are driving cross-border payment adoption. In addition, UPI is rolling out its infrastructure to Peru and Namibia, with several other countries likely to follow.
Brazil is shaping up to be one of the biggest markets for the gaming market in 2025. It is also a market that relies heavily on a national online payment method, PIX. What do operators and suppliers entering this market need to know to navigate their use of PIX successfully?
PIX is one of the standout A2A methods globally. In the four years since launch, its usage has grown exponentially; it’s now a dominant payment method in the market. Adoption of PIX isn’t slowing down, either; 5.8 billion PIX payments were made in October 2024 (+ 43% vs. October 2023).
Seamless, instant and cost-effective payins and payouts have made PIX the perfect option for industries such as gaming. However, expansion to Brazil does have its challenges for international businesses. Operational setup, international money transfer requirements and a constantly evolving regulatory environment can make it a complex project for operators looking to launch in market. Volt does much of the heavy lifting for operators because we act as a merchant of record, meaning they don’t need a local entity accept PIX payments. We handle the end-to-end payment flow, including international transfer.
What does Volt intend to bring to the open-banking market in 2025?
We will continue our efforts to bring real-time payments everywhere through deepening the breadth of our product offering, and widening our geographical reach and coverage. We are introducing Volt Accounts across the UK and Europe, powered by our EMI licence, rolling out more ways to pay (whether it’s recurring payments, other local methods of instant payments and instant payouts) and more currencies in more countries. We are also looking to serve a wider range of sectors including crypto and gaming, making instant payments as accessible as possible for businesses with global needs.
What was the biggest lesson you learnt in 2024 and how do you intend to apply that at Volt in 2025?
As Volt has grown over the past few years, who we serve and our product offering has changed rapidly. We have expanded from solely payment initiation into cash management (driven by our EMI and PI licences) and widened our coverage across three regions: The UK/EU, Brazil and Australia. This has enabled us to attract enterprise businesses such as Farfetch, while also adding complexity to our solution – better enabling us to serve Tier 1 businesses and their own requirements. Throughout 2024 we have had a shift in the business to support these changes, and so in 2025 we can really leverage this effort to deliver for our partners across the globe.