Sep 13, 2022 
Paris/Lausanne, September 13, 2022 – Powens, a leading European player in Open Banking and Open Finance, is now collaborating with CashSentinel, a fintech company specializing in payment systems. In its ongoing search to continually optimize the user journey, CashSentinel has been using Powens’s Open Banking technology since June 2022 to offer a new payment method for the automobile industry: payment initiation.
The MyPortal Auto platform, one of CashSentinel’s leading solutions, enables individuals and auto trade professionals to sell and buy automobiles easily and in total transparency through 100% controlled and secured transactions. This portal now features Pay, the payment initiation solution from Powens.
Up to now, bank cards and transfers have been the only means of payment offered by the platform. While adopting MyPortal Auto has been a huge success (+10% average growth in sales month over month for the last 18 months and now some 1,000 automobiles sold every month), there was still room to improve the customer experience.
At the payment stage, users were frequently faced with the problem of their credit card payment ceilings. If they opted for a traditional bank transfer, they had to add a beneficiary to the bank account using the beneficiary’s IBAN to make the payment. They could do this themselves online or through an advisor, sometimes requiring validation periods.
With payment initiation, this administrative lost time is reduced or even eliminated, depending on the banks, by direct validation of the transfer by the payer through the Powens API. The method also has major advantages for users and CashSentinel:
- The payment is made directly on the platform without changing the interface, thus guaranteeing greater fluidity and conversion;
- The customer no longer has to add a new third-party recipient or copy transfer information, or go to their bank branch;
- The transfer is irrevocable, which considerably reduces the risk of fraud;
- The cost of processing the payment is low.
Sylvain Bertolus, Founder & CEO of CashSentinel, testifies: “With Pay from Powens, we now propose a future-facing solution with simpler and faster payments. Production startup was smooth, and we saw this technical solution was a success right from the first week. We appreciate the technical support provided by the Powens team and the monitoring since the go-live.”
Bertrand Jeannet, CEO of Powens, added: “PSD2 payment initiation enables the simplicity of payment by bank card to be combined with the flexibility of conventional transfers. Through much higher amount ceilings and a smooth journey integrated into the e-commerce site, Pay enables CashSentinel to pass another milestone on the way to generalizing automobile transactions online. We are especially proud of this fine collaboration.”
This payment method now promoted on the platform is already used by close to 10% of customers, and CashSentinel’s goal is to have 30% to 40% of users using this means by the end of 2022.
For more information about Powens’s payment initiation solution
