Word From the CEO
I'm Christian Caumont, with 30 years of experience in the online business world. My journey began with Minitel in France, and I was an early adopter of card transactions on the web.
Over the years, I've observed how card networks established monopolies with their own rules, often not aligned with the law, but rather policies that, while meant to protect cardholders, ended up unfairly impacting many merchants. One such policy was the percentage-based pricing strategy, which, despite the uniformity of database transactions and IT costs, resulted in higher charges based on the transaction amount.
Meanwhile, the introduction of the EURO and SEPA transfers, particularly SEPA instant, offered a fixed-cost alternative without the restrictive, anti-business rules commonly seen with card transactions. Europe has been gradually shifting its focus from card transactions to SEPA transfers, favoring transactions within Europe over those on non-European networks.
This shift inspired me to create Yowpay, a platform designed to make SEPA transactions as easy as card payments but more cost-effective. Yowpay, short for 'Your Own Wave' of payment, simplifies the instant SEPA transfer process for everyone.
While there are existing Payment Initiation Service (PIS) solutions, they are still developing and often underperform in terms of conversion rates. Yowpay stands out by utilizing customers' usual mobile banking apps instead of a manual bank connection process. Our goal was to streamline the payment process to directly compete with card payments, and we've seen great success.
At Yowpay, we leverage modern technologies honed by our group's engineers over 15 years in the bank card sector, including PCI skills. All our data is securely managed in The Netherlands.
Yowpay is just the beginning for Europe. I anticipate a rapid expansion of instant SEPA transfers, which will return financial transaction sovereignty to Europe. The emergence of competitors will further validate this transformation of the European payment landscape, driven by innovative Fintechs reducing transaction costs for merchants and, consequently, prices for consumers.
Yowpay aims to be a market pioneer, gradually replacing card payments as a preferred method in Europe and continually increasing its market share each year.