Zap's founders have a combined 45 years in the payments industry and have experience gained at investment and retail banks, brokerages, fintech startups and unicorns and card networks.
At Zap we consider the Open Banking technology that powers what we do to be one of the most significant changes to the payments landscape that we have seen in our lifetimes and believe that it will go on to reshape and redefine the way that businesses and consumers interact with their banks. That's why we have designed Zap with Open Banking at its core so that we can continue to excite and delight our customers as we work tirelessly towards becoming the best way to pay and get paid!
When Open Banking was brought into existence by the passing of the European Payment Services Directive in 2016 its central remit was to increase competition by loosening the stranglehold on retail banking services, including payments, that the leading European high street banks had enjoyed for decades. And as a result the consumer gets to enjoy more choice!
Open Banking itself is a widely used industry term to describe the framework by which the banks are required, by law, to work with approved 3rd party service providers such as Zap. The technology that has been created to facilitate Open Banking can be seen as the bedrock upon which new, innovative and secure banking solutions like Zap are able to be built.
The Zap team were quick to spot the potential that Open Banking offers to reshape the way in which people pay and get paid and feel now is the time to launch the first phase of our vision for the future of payments by focusing on helping small retailers, so impacted by the global pandemic to save money on taking payments. Thereby freeing them to get back to what they do best - providing great products and services to their customers.