Two separate initiatives were made public last week. First of all Planet reports that payment service provider Mollie has chosen to repackage the functionality of iDEAL (on-line payment via Dutch bank account on the web) so that the only thing a web-merchant pays is a percentage of the value. No set up fee, no maintainance fee, just this percentage. To make this work, Mollie has made an agreement with ABN AMRO Bank so that it ABN AMRO does the routing of the payments and Mollie does the reconciliation, contacts with merchants etcetera.
Then, a week later, Emerce updates us with the news that Rabobank will introduce an iDEAL lite version. This version has lower maintainance fees and higher transaction fees. In the article, Postbank and ING stated that they will not introduce a light version. With Postbank/ING there is no maintainance fee to start with.
Quite a nice demonstration of innovation and competition in the payments market.
