Crypto-currencies: Lydia partners with Bitpanda
Crypto-currencies have not yet convinced the entire payment industry, but it is clear that their influence is growing by the day. Intriguing and full of promise, these crypto-currencies have been trying for a few years to become part of people’s daily lives. A step has just been taken to achieve this goal, with the association of Lydia and Bitpanda.
Credits : Cryptonaute
Lydia: the new French payment unicorn
Let’s first resituate Lydia’s place in the French payment ecosystem. Since 2011, Lydia has established itself as a French FinTech specialized in mobile payments. It has the status of PSP (Payment Service Provider) and has experienced a remarkable development over the past few years.
Lydia has indeed raised two major rounds of financing in two years: 40 millions of euros in 2020 and more recently 103 millions in December 2021. These consecutive fundraisings have propelled Lydia to the rank of French unicorn, a company valued at more than one billion dollars without being part of a large group or being listed on the stock exchange.
Confident of its strengths and growing influence, the unicorn has therefore decided to enter the digital assets business by partnering with Bitpanda. Lydia will eventually be able to propose its own digital investment offer, respecting its branding and bearing its colors.
A directly integrated cryptocurrency exchange platform
So the 5 million users of the mobile payment app will soon be able to invest and speculate on digital assets within the Lydia app itself. Where more powerful players than Lydia like Paypal have been slow to integrate cryptoassets, Lydia has succeeded thanks to a simple partnership.
And this partnership is no small one: Bitpanda is among the most influential exchange platforms. The combination of the two companies ultimately forms the only platform offering banking and payment services in addition to access to cryptocurrency exchange platforms.
The goal here is to make these platforms more accessible and eventually democratize the exchange and speculation on crypto-currencies. It is indeed still relatively complicated to sign up and get involved in this market, as Cyril Chiche, CEO of Lydia, points out. The registration process can take several days and requires certain verifications hindering the subscription.
Credits : Lydia
Lydia and Bitpanda intend to make this process frictionless. By integrating it directly into the mobile application, users won’t even have to search for the feature. It will be recommended to them naturally while browsing. The accessibility of the service is a key point in its success, because modern users do not hesitate to change service or application when the latter do not seem clear to them. They know that many proposals exist and do not hesitate to look elsewhere.
Beyond offering their users a modern cryptocurrency trading platform, one of the intrinsic goals of this project is also to get ahead of the offerings of traditional and neo-banks. More cautious than many Fintechs towards innovations of this magnitude, the big traditional banking institutions are taking time to think and propose solutions on the subject.
Lydia, Bitpanda and globally all the other Fintechs are aware of the freedom they have in their service proposals. Open Banking has completely reshuffled the cards of payment by allowing all these Fintechs to process financial flows, a task previously reserved exclusively for traditional banks. It is from this Open Banking that new innovative concepts are emerging, some more successful than others.
In any case, it is inevitable that services like the one mentioned in this article will appear. Cryptocurrencies worry as much as they fascinate, but the multiplication of services linked to them proves that the fascination exceeds the worry. It’s hard not to recognize the existence of these active cryptos, which through solutions such as Lydia and Bitpanda will be discovered by more and more users.
