Business & Finance

Donal McGuinness, CEO of Prommt, talks about emerging trends in the payments industry, Prommt’s major highlights and achievements this past year, future plans for the company, his biggest challenges as CEO, his favourite hobbies and books, his life mantra, and more.

Irish Tech News

For hotels, hosting events like weddings and conferences goes beyond providing a venue. It involves orchestrating a symphony of services while ensuring every transaction is as smooth as the occasion itself. Enter open banking, a game-changer for high-value event payments.

Open banking eliminates the hassle of card limits and costly processing fees and offers a safer, faster, and more cost-effective alternative to manual bank transfers, drafts or cheques. It transforms event payments with automation and enhanced security by saving time, cutting transaction fees, and lowering operational costs. It reduces fraud and data risks, while exceeding guest expectations for seamless transactions.

Pay360 Awards 2024 | The Payments Association

Prommt is thrilled to be selected as a finalist for Pay360’s Best Open Banking/A2A Initiative Award 2024! Prommt is a payments orchestration platform that is revolutionising remote payments for enterprises and their clients. We have expanded Pay by Bank use cases across hospitality, luxury retail, builders merchant and automotive sectors with our pay by link capabilities. Our solution enables secure, seamless checkouts via SMS, email, chat, web, or in-app, offering Pay by Bank as a default or alternative payment method based on a set of orchestration parameters such as transaction value, location, or customer type.

It is a huge honour for us to be recognised as a company driving impact in the world of payments, and a testament to our team’s hard work and dedication to excellence. We’re looking forward to the awards ceremony in October, and wish all the finalists in our category the best of luck!

Business Age

“Dealing with large sums brings unique challenges, and this is where open banking can be a lifesaver. It eliminates the constraints of card limits and costly processing fees and offers a safer, quicker, and more efficient alternative to traditional bank transfers, drafts, or cheques,” writes Donal McGuinness, CEO at Prommt.

Wedding planners must balance deposits, final payments, and ensure smooth transactions while coordinating with multiple vendors. Vendors frequently face payment delays that impact cash flow and service delivery. Venues manage booking fees, milestone payments, and refunds, often with outdated spreadsheets. Risks like fraud, chargebacks, data breaches, and human errors complicate payment administration and increase costs. Meanwhile, the happy couple must budget meticulously, track expenses, and ensure payments stay on schedule, all without dampening their excitement for the big day.

In his latest op-ed for Business Age, Donal explains how open banking accelerates payments, increases savings, reduces fraud, and ensures data compliance.

CPA Ireland | Accountancy Plus

“The viability of any business hinges on the efficiency of your accounts receivable (AR) function. Customers need to make payments based on invoices received and Open Banking significantly optimises the AR function,” writes Donal McGuinness, CEO of Prommt.

Open Banking is rapidly gaining popularity in the Irish payments landscape, hitting a new level of maturity this year with increased users, services, and regulatory attention. It’s transforming higher-value transactions by eliminating card limits and costly processing fees, while providing a safer, faster, and more efficient alternative to traditional bank transfers, drafts or cheques. In this month’s issue of Accountancy Plus, Donal explores the top 5 Open Banking trends of the year.

European Business Magazine

“As online shopping, live selling, and social commerce continue to grow, the luxury shopping experience must evolve to be more immersive, customised, and secure,” writes Donal McGuinness, CEO of Prommt.

Open banking payments are the ideal choice for luxury purchases. Customers experience a seamless, secure payment process directly from their banking app, while merchants enjoy reduced processing and operational fees, as well as strengthened fraud prevention measures.

Token.io announces Prommt as first partner to leverage its new hosted payment pages; enhancing user experiences and maximising conversion for Pay by Bank.

Hosted payment pages are secure web pages that provide businesses with plug-and-play checkout or payment capabilities. Payment Service Providers (PSPs), banks and merchants can leverage Token.io’s white label ‘Hosted Pages’ to quickly and easily launch their own custom branded Pay by Bank capabilities while maximising conversions.

“By leveraging Token.io’s Hosted Pages, we can elevate the Pay by Bank experience for our merchants, enabling them to capitalise on the growing potential of open banking-enabled payments,” Stephen Culligan, Chief Product Officer at Prommt commented. “This not only helps businesses lower payment processing costs, improve liquidity and reduce fraud, but also empowers them to deliver exceptional payment experiences for their customers across multiple touchpoints and channels. We’re thrilled to continue our collaboration with Token.io as we drive the widespread adoption of Pay by Bank.”

E-Commerce Times

In 2023, the global retail sector lost $429 billion USD to payments fraud. Nearly half of all businesses worldwide experienced some form of fraudulent activity, cyberattacks, or data breaches over the past year — an increase of 32% compared to 2022, according to Prommt CEO Donal McGuinness

“This calls for immediate investments in secure payment processes and fraud prevention measures,” McGuinness told the E-Commerce Times. “Preventing fraud, protecting customer data and privacy, and ensuring compliance with regulations are increasingly becoming top priorities for payments technology.”

He explained that it requires implementing data encryption and tokenization, enforcing strict data governance, applying access controls and robust authentication measures, and adhering to global compliance standards.

Read Donal’s contribution to the E-Commerce Times latest article on the transformation of the payments industry.

Retail Banker International & Electronic Payments International

70% of shoppers prioritise the availability of their preferred payment method when choosing where to complete a purchase. For Millennials, this preference is even more pronounced, as 80% will abandon an online checkout if their desired payment option is unavailable.

In order to mitigate cart abandonment and meet customer expectations, it’s crucial to remove friction at checkout and offer a variety of payment methods, ensuring easy, seamless, and secure transactions. The checkout should be simple and streamlined – the fewer steps from product discovery to purchase, the better.

Businesses can shift their focus from cart abandonment to payment success, by embracing innovative and secure payment solutions with automation and smart features – like payment reminders, personal shopping with a card on file, and automated chase paths for failed transactions. Donal McGuinness, Prommt CEO, discusses how leveraging payment orchestration tools and data analytics helps businesses gain a competitive edge, be highly responsive to customer needs, and understand customer behaviour to attract and retain them.

A whitepaper by Edgar Dunn & Company, commissioned by Prommt and Barclaycard

Pay by Link is establishing itself as an alternative in the evolution of digital payments. Smarter and more sophisticated solutions are reducing costs and improving the customer experience, helping to increase sales in the remote payments market.

Fraud and the protection of customer data provide an ever-increasing challenge for the payment industry. Evolving Pay by Link solutions offer significantly improved protection and peace of mind to customers and merchants offering high value goods and services. It not only protects and supports the entire payments value chain, but it provides a high level of customer experience offering significant advantages for merchants to safely drive and increase sales in specialised markets.

Explore the evolving landscape of traditional MOTO payments, the challenges faced by merchants, the advancements in Pay by Link innovation and its benefits in the remote payment sector.