In today’s rapidly evolving payments landscape, the search for a competitive edge is paramount for financial service companies. As customer expectations for speed, security, and seamless digital experiences continue to rise, traditional payment methods often fall short, creating friction and hindering growth. Businesses are constantly seeking innovative solutions that streamline operations, enhance user satisfaction, and build lasting trust – but how to achieve this winning combination?
Quentin Barria, Head of Sales at Brite Payments, delves into how Brite’s cutting-edge payment solutions provide significant value, particularly its instant Account-to-Account (A2A) payments and data solutions. He also explains the operational efficiencies, enhanced security, and superior customer experience that Brite provides companies, detailing how these advantages translate into tangible competitive advantages for financial service providers.
What are the most significant benefits Brite enables for financial service companies?
Quentin Barria, Head of Sales at Brite Payments: Brite delivers significant value to financial services companies by enabling instant, secure and seamless account-to-account (A2A) payments.
One of Brite’s main advantages is combining user authentication and payment initiation into one frictionless flow. This ensures high conversion rates while providing a streamlined customer experience, which is critical in a high-trust environment like financial services.
Another benefit – particularly for financial services – is the ability to process transactions quickly. What really differentiates Brite is its operational speed and reliability of instant payment processing.
These businesses rely on time-sensitive transactions, whether for funding and investment accounts or facilitating real-time lending decisions and with Brite transactions settling in seconds, directly improving user satisfaction.
Brite also provides operational efficiency. Unlike many providers who only offer access to payment rails, Brite operates on a proprietary full-stack infrastructure, meaning that we don’t just initiate payments. We also manage the movement and settlement of funds. This control enables better performance, lower failure rates, and greater transparency for our partners.
Another differentiator is our merchant FX service, which is valuable especially for cross-border financial services platforms, and it allows merchants to manage foreign exchange efficiently, always within the same A2A payment solution
What is the real-world value of open banking and instant payment technologies for businesses in 2025?
Quentin Barria: Identity verification is key to compliance, security, and fraud prevention. Because A2A is essentially an instant transfer between bank accounts, paying via bank account inherently complies with banking regulations and leverages the checks of the financial system. For example, an A2A payment negates certain types of fraud common with cards, i.e. no card number can be stolen or skimmed; each A2A payment typically requires bank-level authentication, which makes it very difficult for an unauthorised party to initiate a payment.
Lastly, from a user perspective, it is a safer customer experience when you can directly authorise payments through your bank’s secure portal with strong customer authentication embedded at checkout without redirect. But let’s not forget that financial service businesses often have two payment journeys to facilitate. There are many use cases where paying out to a consumer is still clunky or cumbersome as an experience for the merchants or the consumers.
A2A providers such as Brite can significantly reduce and streamline payout journeys and offer merchants the ability to service markets they didn’t previously have access to. Due to our significant payout coverage, we see a huge opportunity in the market.
Can you share examples of how Brite solves critical challenges or unlocks a new opportunity for a financial service client?
Quentin Barria: Sure, for instance, some of Brite’s customers who operate in the trading and investment vertical faced challenges in terms of their deposit offering capabilities. They could easily handle instant small deposits, but offered slower large deposits. Indeed, moving from a payment mix of small instant deposits and recurring bank deposits that took one to two bank days to process to Brite instant payments enabled them to provide small and large transactions that settle in seconds. Not only did this raise customer expectations, but it also increased the average deposit size for customers, enabling the institution to boost its assets under management rate, and it also solved a pain point for their customers.
By making depositing more convenient and faster, addressing those pain points, and enabling real-time large deposits, businesses have improved customer satisfaction and attracted higher-value customers.
We’ve also seen a lot of interest in our KYC capabilities in heavily regulated industries. Merchants are burdened with collecting extensive consumer information to stay compliant. For example, this process can be long for consumers who simply want to deposit funds quickly and trade. And this leads to churn as consumers shop around, looking for platforms that might offer faster and more accessible ways to get what they want.
Furthermore, many merchants break that process up into several stages. Identity, personal data, and source of funds are asked in a disjointed way, which introduces more opportunities for consumers to get fed up and churn. At Brite, we model these steps efficiently and consider the consumer’s needs and motivation to complete the full process.
How does Brite contribute to a firm’s ability to attract new clients and foster deep loyalty with existing ones?
Quentin Barria: Brite contributes to increasing customer loyalty by playing a key role in acquisition and retention, enhancing the end-user experience where and when it matters most, which is at the moment of transaction.
Brite increases first-time conversion on the acquisition side by removing friction from account accretion. On the retention side, instant access to funds drives ongoing engagement. Customers who get funds instantly are more likely to stay active.
Last but not least, trust plays a significant role. For this reason, Brite is also a branded payment solution. There’s a reason payment methods such as Klarna and PayPal, to name a few, have achieved great success: brand affinity.
People tend to judge based on association, and payment experiences are no different. By having a branded customer-facing payment journey, we ensure that consumers know what to expect from a brand they can trust. Brite is committed to maintaining this consistency and excellence throughout our users’ journeys.
When a financial services company contacts you, at what point do they fully grasp what Brite offers?
Quentin Barria: I will say that the aha moment usually hits when they see the smooth and intuitive payment flow. Financial services companies expect speed, but a critical differentiator is how user-centric the experience feels. The interface is intuitive, and the lean and clean flow means everything is designed to minimise friction, which drives users to come back and use it again. This translates into higher conversion, higher retention, and an overall better brand experience for these companies, not only in improving performance metrics but also brand loyalty at checkout.
What are some of the most common reservations financial service companies have when contemplating a Pay by Bank service or instant payouts?
Quentin Barria: A common reservation when introducing new payments technology or a platform is the question: “Will my customer actually use this?”
Brite addresses this by focusing on optimising simplicity and ease of use in the interface, mobile-first design, and no app signups. Brite prioritises a consistent and intuitive Pay by Bank flow for the end user. After all, financial services platforms need to provide an intuitive, fast, and secure experience.
Another reservation would be a possible fragmented user experience across banks. Financial services businesses want a predictable, frictionless user experience to avoid lost conversions and customer support issues. Brite solves this through its proprietary infrastructure and high bank coverage across Europe. This means that regardless of their bank, the customer journey generally involves selecting the bank, choosing an account, and confirming the payment. Users don’t get bounced between third-party apps or redirects.
What are the most significant opportunities or emerging payment trends for finance businesses?
Quentin Barria: Firstly, instant payments are becoming the norm as real-time money movement and instant settlement become core expectations. Additionally, the emergence and the use of open banking to verify bank accounts and facilitate faster onboarding processes for financial services are reducing payment failures commonly associated with traditional payment methods, such as cards.
One can mention the integration of digital identity in payments, with strong digital identification embedded into payment flows, too. This matters for financial services as it enhances KYC, fraud prevention, and user trust.
There is also a huge opportunity in cross-border payments, specifically consumer fees. Currently, the card networks have a distribution and accessibility advantage that is very attractive to merchants and consumers, and cards are accepted everywhere. This means that businesses feel pressure to adhere to the must-take phenomenon: they must take card payments for fear of missing out on the payment altogether.
As A2A payment schemes and SEPA Instant grow in popularity with merchants, we see a huge opportunity to reduce the burden on consumers to pay foreign exchange fees when buying in other markets. Removing fees for consumers and allowing merchants to save on payment processing fees is a an opportunity that Brite believes will become a reality.
What’s Brite’s approach to innovation in terms of the future needs of the financial service industry?
Quentin Barria: At Brite, we closely monitor evolving regulations and continually explore new ways to stay ahead of industry trends and consumer expectations. Among what’s cooking, we can mention that firstly, the instant payment regulation is allowing payments to be done across the eurozone, and we are including it in our Brite instant payment network as another clearing method to make it faster and increase feature parity between banks and countries.
Brite is also working on simplifying customer recognition, a key factor in A2A, reducing the number of steps. This ranges from simple adjustments like “remember me” to a fully tailored user experience using biometrics or passkeys.
Last but not least, Brite is also following industry trends to improve the experience and seamlessly integrate with our merchants’ offerings. For example, we can name the dark mode, which is a darker interface in low light to reduce eye strain, mobile-first architecture, and customising flows.
If we focus on the DACH region, how is Brite best placed to provide instant payment solutions?
Quentin Barria: The payment landscape in the DACH region, especially in Germany, is changing rapidly. More consumers are becoming familiar with it, and adoption is growing. Over a third of young adults in the region already use Pay by Bank weekly. More than half of Gen Z in Germany now prefer an account-to-account for online purchases—which a clear signal of where the market is and that Brite is well positioned to meet the shift.
Moreover, Brite is an EU-native company, and Germany, in particular, represents a huge opportunity, as it’s one of the biggest markets globally. However, many merchants still rely on outdated or costly options. With legacy solutions phasing out or becoming increasingly expensive, the market needs a reliable, scalable alternative optimised for A2A payments. That’s precisely what Brite offers. Our proprietary infrastructure gives us full end-to-end control and broad bank coverage across the region.
Furthermore, Brite’s payment methods are growing in Germany and the DACH region, with strong local partnerships such as Oxid or Shopware. This local experience makes a real difference when it comes to user experience and integration, which is why Brite has also been recognised across the industry, recently winning awards for the best use of open banking for payments in Berlin at MPE 2025, and is regularly listed among the most innovative fintechs in Europe.
Want to know more about how Brite can help your business?
Gaining a competitive edge is paramount in the rapidly evolving financial landscape. Brite Payments’ cutting-edge instant A2A payments and data solutions are just that. Not only do they provide operational efficiencies, enhanced security, and a superior customer experience, but they also directly translate into tangible advantages for financial service providers.
From streamlining KYC to enabling instant large deposits, Brite aims to define open banking payment experiences for financial services today and in the future by offering a trusted, branded payment journey and staying ahead of emerging trends.
Want to know more about how Brite Payment solutions can help your business? Contact us today.
