Open Banking: CRIF enriches its offering with a PISP licence for CRIF Realtime Ireland

CRIF - a global company specializing in credit and business information systems, analytics, outsourcing and processing services, as well as advanced digital solutions for business development and open banking - announces its successful registration as a Payment Initiation Service Provider (PISP) with the Central Bank of Ireland.

The authorization issued to CRIF Realtime Ireland, a Group company based in Dublin and 100% controlled by CRIF, extends CRIF’s capabilities in the Open Banking area by providing payment initiation services.

After the AISP, CRIF is again the first credit reporting agency to achieve a PISP licence within the European Union, thus showing its ambition to be innovative by opening the way to new services that strengthen its commitment to digital financial inclusion.

A PISP is a payment institution which, under the revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2), initiates a payment order at the request of the payment service user with respect to a payment account held with another payment service provider.

More specifically, thanks to this licence CRIF will be able to support a variety of clients – not only financial institutions – through a combined offering of proprietary data, Open Banking data and Open Banking payments, thus enabling a set of new use cases spanning across different industries.

This unique set of capabilities enables fully digital processes not only for lending purposes, but also to boost commercial relationships and increase customer retention, while boosting service personalization through enhanced customer knowledge. Adding payment initiation services allows the completion of digital processes, from identification to the final check-out, which represents one of the most sensitive steps because of its high dropout rates, both in B2C and B2B payments.

“We are pleased to announce that thanks to this new registration, CRIF is now able to support an even greater number of credit institutions and non-financial companies in the provision of more innovative services, complying with the best data protection and security standards. Moreover, there is the added possibility of integrating with our platform designed to create an ecosystem, with new services which will enable operators and their end customers, consumers and businesses, to obtain maximum added value” - commented Enrico Lodi, CRIF Managing Director.