Cashflows and fumopay triumphed at the Open Banking Expo Awards, winning the Best Partnership of the Year category

Cashflows and fumopay celebrated at Open Banking Expo Awards, Winning Best Partnership of the Year

Cashflows and fumopay triumphed at the Open Banking Expo Awards, winning the Best Partnership of the Year category for their joint efforts in bringing the card and open banking worlds together. The awards celebrate the organisations, teams and individuals leading the way in Open Banking, Open Finance and Smart Data across the globe.

Q&A with Ian Hazelwood, Head of Relationship Management, Cashflows

To start can you tell us how the partnership came together, and what did each organisation bring to the table?

Cashflows and fumopay built a two-way partnership that brings the card and open banking worlds together. The relationship runs in both directions: fumopay first selected Cashflows as its card acquiring partner while we adopted fumopay's open banking rails to launch a real-time merchant payout solution. Each company strengthens the other's proposition, which is what an industry partnership should do.

The result is that there are two independent businesses strengthening the other's proposition. fumopay gained robust card acquiring to sit alongside its open banking capability while Cashflows gained a real-time, account-to-account payout capability it did not previously offer. Neither is a passive supplier to the other, we reciprocate.

What need does the partnership address?

Merchants that pay money out have long relied on manual and fragmented processes. Staff log into banking portals, copy sort codes and account numbers by hand, set up payees and release funds, often late into the evening or at weekends when payout demand peaks. This is a slow and costly process that is hard to audit and can be exposed to error and fraud.

The partnership changes what these merchants can do for their own customers. The processes can now be replaced with instant account-to-account payouts, underpinned by account and identity verification, configurable controls and full auditability. It serves merchants wherever timely payment matters, from payroll and insurance payouts to e-commerce refunds and competition website prize disbursements.

Finally, what makes this partnership different?

Rather than a supplier-and-customer arrangement, this is two independent businesses solving a shared customer problem. fumopay contributes proprietary open banking infrastructure and payout logic; Cashflows contributes acquiring scale and merchant reach. Together we demonstrate that open banking can complement card processing and expand what merchants offer their customers.

We’re very proud of our relationship with fumopay, this award celebrates our successes to date as partners, and we look forward to working with them long into the future.