Ecospend

Ecospend is a British company offering an open banking infrastructure platform for enterprises to accept payments directly from bank accounts, as well as to verify and gain financial insights through bank account data. The platform offers a range of payment options, including recurring payments, pay-by-link, QR code payments, real-time payments, and request-to-pay (RTP). 

Ecospend also enables enterprises to get a range of financial insights on their customers through account information services (AIS), including affordability checks, aggregating and viewing financial data, account verifications, and account monitoring, among other methods. 

The company claims its platform offers bank-level security and caters to a wide range of industries, including digital banking, gaming, media, ecommerce, and utilities, among others. The company came out of stealth in late-2020, and as of February 2021, it employed around 50 employees across its offices in London and the EU.  

Key customers and partnerships

Ecospend had initiated around GBP 2.4 billion worth of open banking payments as of January 2022. This was supported by HMRC (Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs) offering a GBP 3 million contract to Ecospend in March 2021, to integrate open banking into tax payments (across 13 HMRC tax regimes), making it the first government to do so. Around 94,000 customers had reportedly used this open banking solution to pay GBP 123 million (USD 152 million) in self-assessment payments over February-October 2022. 

The company also partnered with European Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) platform Contis (a subsidiary of Solaris ) in January 2022, to enable Contis’s users to make payments directly from bank accounts, and gain financial insights on end customers.