Enfuce and Orka Ventures launch market-first consumer lending card and app to challenge traditional BNPL lending
- Intuitive mobile app allows Orka Ventures to offer open banking connections for first time in Iceland, along with Visa debit card
- New Orka Card challenges traditional understanding of ‘Buy Now Pay Later’ lending and will help to promote financial inclusion
- Partnership will see issuer processor pioneer Enfuce supporting Orka Ventures’ expansion into core Nordic markets and growth in home markets of Czech Republic, Denmark and Iceland
Helsinki, 11 January 2023 – Pioneering issuer processing powerhouse, Enfuce, today announces a new partnership with Orka Ventures, the Nordic-Czech fintech holding company, to launch Orka Card, a new consumer lending card and mobile app that challenges the traditional understanding of ‘Buy Now Pay Later’ (BNPL) lending.
Until now, Orka Ventures has focused mainly on providing web-based consumer loans. However, with changing consumer demand for more agile service delivery and Orka Ventures’ evolution into a neobank, it will now leverage Enfuce’s unrivalled agile modular processing and compliance capabilities to launch card services across its European markets. With these new capabilities, the Orka Card will enable customers to integrate their existing bank accounts in one card and app.
The Orka Card will also incorporate Orka Ventures’ Pay Now Finance Later (PNFL) programme, so that a customer can choose to refinance a transaction that was originally executed through other debit and credit cards – a new take on BNPL lending. By allowing cardholders to repay a previously purchased item on a payment plan in fixed monthly instalments, Orka Ventures is facilitating financial literacy and financial health through reducing a borrower’s risk of overextension.
For the first time in Iceland, the sleek and intuitively designed Orka Card mobile app will enable open banking connections by integrating customers’ bank accounts and supporting its PNFL feature. In turn, this will enable Orka Ventures to gather dynamic data and real-time understanding about its customers’ spending habits, income and expenses data. For Orka Ventures, the new product will allow it to better understand its customers and to offer tailored loans to suit their needs and habits.
Established in 2016 in Finland, Enfuce is an issuer processor that can launch a feature-rich payment card for businesses in just eight weeks and is already trusted by more than 35 partners. Through one core integration into its cloud processing platform, Enfuce’s platform converts data into PSD2-compliant data, ensuring that account information data (AIS) and payment initiation (PIS) APIs can be securely exposed to third parties, ensuring smooth and secure payment experiences for Orka Ventures and its customers.
Orka Ventures, which has been serving customers for over a decade from its home in Iceland, and has established separate brands in the Czech Republic, and Denmark, also selected Enfuce as a trusted partner in the Nordics to support its planned growth into that region. As well as its existing locations, Enfuce will work with Orka Ventures to launch Orka Card in Finland, Sweden and Norway. With plans to rename its separate brands and offer products under the Orka Card brand name across Europe to more than 500,000 customers, Orka Ventures will benefit from Enfuce’s cloud-native agility, rapid onboarding speed and pan-European compliance expertise to launch products quickly, securely and cost-effectively.
Ondřej Šmakal, CEO of Orka Ventures, comments “At the beginning of 2022, Orka Ventures was looking for a new partner to support the development and launch of Orka Card. We chose Enfuce because of its excellent technical expertise, supportive team and great attitude to problem-solving. Enfuce is now a part of our team, and our developers consistently give us feedback about how easy it is to integrate with Enfuce’s platform. It was also important to us to choose a partner that is willing to support the expansion of Orka Card into the Nordic markets as well as to work with us in Iceland – this is not common as it’s a small country with complicated regulations.”
“We want Orka Ventures to grow sustainably by nurturing and further monetising the relationships we have with our existing customer base. By offering them services that are useful, and that they will probably not be offered by the legacy banks, we can grow our revenue and eventually our customer base. From a customer perspective, Orka Ventures’ aim is to bring fair, convenient and sustainable consumer lending to customers who are often excluded from lending or loan opportunities with our new, premium product.”
Denise Johansson, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Enfuce, says: “The Enfuce mission is to remove the complexity of payments and provide flexible payment solutions that enable our customers to grow and provide an excellent customer experience to their end-customers. We’re confident that our partnership with Orka Ventures will deliver real value to consumers in the core markets of Iceland and the Nordic regions.”
Monika Liikamaa, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Enfuce, adds: “Supporting the growth of an inspiring fintech with the kind of big ambitions Orka has, is what Enfuce is all about. Our partnership with Orka demonstrates our joint commitment to smashing down barriers and promoting financial inclusion. Using Enfuce’s cloud-native card issuing platform, with unmatched scalability and enhanced security, Orka Ventures is set to bring sustainable consumer lending to more customers across Europe.”
The new partnership follows Enfuce’s bold entrance into the UK in July 2022, bringing its disruptive cloud-native CaaS platform to Europe’s largest and most active fintech hotbed. Led by co-founders and co-CEOs Monika Liikamaa and Denise Johansson, Enfuce secured €45 million in Series C funding from Vitruvian Partners, a global investment firm which is intent on supporting the most ambitious, high-growth companies. Enfuce is using the funding to kickstart its expansion across Europe and become the go-to payments partner for companies in every sector, as embedded finance opportunities open up to meet urgent consumer and business demand.
Enfuce offers a fast alternative to existing issuer processing platforms, with the agility to quickly add modules as and when needed, and a flexible pricing model that’s far more cost-effective and in tune with the scaling needs that companies such as Orka Ventures look for. Enfuce supports debit, credit, prepaid, gift, fleet and fuel card programmes in any form – plastic, digital and/or tokenised – for consumer, commercial and B2B applications, along with digital wallets. The first in the world to fully move card issuing to the cloud, and with its turnkey service model, packaged BIN sponsoring, and all regulatory compliance taken care of, Enfuce is a one-stop shop for companies that want to issue cards to their customers.
Enfuce’s CaaS ensures banks, fintechs, financial institutions and non-bank brands can become and remain fully PSD2-compliant, with programme management, data reporting and analytics, BIN sponsorship, card issuing, and effortless regulatory KYC/AML and payment scheme compliance all taken care of. With these unmatched levels of speed, flexibility and end-to-end programme management, clients can launch card payment services for customers with quicker time-to-market, give third-party service providers access to digital accounts, and give customers and end users even more choice in payment methods.
*Visa is a registered trademark of Visa International Service Association.
For more information:
Ondřej Šmakal
CEO
ondrej@orka-ventures.com
Monika Liikamaa
Co-CEO and Co-Founder
monika@enfuce.com
+358 50 306 5213
About Orka Ventures
Orka Ventures provides consumer loans and other financial services in the Nordics area and in Central Europe. Orka’s brands use highly complex algorithmic scoring based on big data analysis to minimize fraud and reduce impairments. Orka, which has its headquarters in Prague, Czechia, has more than ten years of experience in its core markets and brings to the industry an emphasis on process automation to cater to underserved and underbanked customers. Over 125,000 customers have received consumer loans from Orka’s brands, for more than €133 million. Orka’s planned expansion strategy, in partnership with Enfuce, will bring its innovative products – including its Pay Now, Finance Later feature – to most European countries with a projected reach of 60 to 80 million customers.
About Orka Ventures’ Pay Now Finance Later programme
Orka Ventures’ PNFL model allows cardholders to repay a previously purchased item on a payment plan in fixed monthly instalments. This reduces the borrower’s risk of overextension, such as loan stacking and sustained usage. It promotes financial health by requesting the customer to post the full down payment for the item purchase, proving her ability to repay the instalments later. This is further supported by Open Banking connections, enabling customers to purchase items with their preferred card before heading to the Orka mobile app for the PNFL feature.
For more information, please visit: https://orkacard.com/en
About Enfuce
Enfuce is a one-stop shop for modern card issuing and payment processing. Founded in 2016, Enfuce has become one of Europe’s leading payment processors that delivers cutting edge debit, prepaid, and credit card solutions across Europe and scaling globally, with offices in Finland, Germany, Latvia, Sweden, and the UK. With Enfuce card solutions, traditional banks, neobanks, and fintechs can create next-level payment experiences for their end users now and into the future.
Enfuce has raised a total of €62 million in several funding rounds and been awarded with recognitions like the Visa Fintech Fast Track programme, Mastercard Lighthouse Development Programme, and 2019 PayTech Award for Best Payments solution for Payment Systems in the Cloud.
