Today we celebrate One Year as a Payment Institution

Last year, in 2021, on the 11th of February, the Financial Supervisory Authority in Sweden “Finansinspektionen” made a positive decision to grant us the Financial Institution License covering the European Economic Area (EEA). The news reached us one day later, and across the company an “all caps email” was traversing with the ending words “GET THE F***NG CHAMPAGNE”.

In 2018 we were planning the business. In 2019-Q2 we established the Joint Venture Plusius and started the work on a payments application - completely cross-border oriented. Our clients are within the EEA, and their needs to collect and settle worldwide were soaring. Plenty of the streams were utterly out of their own control.

We sat out to solve the smallest of challenges, beginning with the tax refunds targeting Chinese private persons and European organizations working with VAT balances. Later, this evolved to simplifying the refund of airline tickets bought by individuals outside their normal payment loop.

In 2019-Q4 we visited AliPay with a demo, both in Shanghai and Hangzhou. After a few meetings … It was champagne again! AliPay had just started a partnership with the Bank of Shanghai to ease the Western payment flows going to the East, and in doing so, bridging the problems in one direction. The other direction and also the targeting of refunds still had untouched grounds, but the hunger was there.

--- Weeks later, Covid-19 hit with full force in China. ---

In 2020-Q1 the fact was out, global pandemic! In June we were done with the updated application to the Financial Supervisory Authority. This was not an easy task given that we are writing about catering to “any type of a company on any market” as long as we can make sure the risk is low, considering that we are born in the tax space.

Now, THE CHAMPAGNE moment. On the 12th of February, 2021 we received a physical mail stating that on the 11th of February the decision was made to approve our transformation from a normal company to a financial institution.

Several business cases lined up for implementation and “Woops!”, another VAT/IOSS/TOLL case landed in our lap and quickly became our priority.

One year has passed since then and we have on-boarded several global banking networks. We started to issue local bank accounts for our platforms (clients) with the help of partnerships with banks and banking networks.

The transactions started for real in 2021-Q4. We are rapidly growing within the area and currently we are working with strategic partnerships primarily towards the industries that handle e-commerce payments. Together with our partners, we are offering an auxiliary service that solely and effectively will make global trade go faster, more accurately and without speed-bumps.

Today we celebrate One Year as a Payment Institution with recent numbers saying that January 2022 performed better than 2021-Q4 summarized. That is growth! With additional twenty-four partners under negotiation for the months to come.

Cheers to more years of positive and rewarding impact!
Yours, Plusius Family