Mastercard’s Aiia launches ‘Pay by Link’ for European SMEs

Mastercard has unveiled a new payments feature, ‘Pay by Link’, led by its European Open Banking platform Aiia, which is designed to allow businesses to accept and receive payments anywhere.

Using the feature, businesses create a link that is sent to customers to enable them to pay instantly.

Aiia, which is a Mastercard company, said the feature is being rolled out in the Nordics and is expected to “hit the full European landscape” throughout 2022.

Aiia CEO Rune Mai

“We’re in the process of transforming the way people pay bills,” said Rune Mai, co-founder and CEO of Aiia.

“With a simple link, we make it easy and secure to pay a bill on the go with a bank account, without having to enter or remember payment details. With ‘pay by link’, we give businesses the opportunity to accept and receive payments anywhere and reduce friction in the entire payment flow.”

Aiia’s payments feature is already live with Nordic accounting software provider Dinero, which is using it to simplify the invoice payments process for SMEs.

Martin Thorborg, co-founder and CEO of Visma Dinero, added: “With a simple payment link, we’re enabling our customers to get paid on time by using Open Banking payments in a flow that they trust with their bank.

“In combination with our additional access to account information from Aiia , we now make it incredibly smooth to both pay and reconcile for thousands of businesses.”

Mastercard agreed to acquire Aiia in September 2021, to expand its Open Banking reach. At the time, Aiia offered a direct connection to more than 2,700 banks across Europe through a single API.