Lydia Turns to Marqeta to Power Sumeria Banking App

Card-issuing platform Marqeta has expanded its partnership with French payments firm Lydia.

This extended collaboration, announced Tuesday (June 4), will see Marqeta power Lydia’s European digital banking super app Sumeria. This app has introduced new capabilities including a remunerated current account, and plans to expand quickly throughout Europe with Marqeta’s help, the companies said in a news release.

“Even though many traditional banks now have digital offerings, they’re still not the personalized, digital-first experiences that people are seeking from their banking partners,” said Cyril Ciche, CEO at Lydia. “Marqeta has enabled us to challenge the norms of traditional banking and payments and create more flexible and streamlined experiences for our cardholders.”

Lydia launched Sumeria last month, saying it was investing more than 100 million euros ($108.8 million) and hiring 400 people in three years to become a major player in this sector in France before expanding to other parts of Europe.

While Lydia was started in 2013 to launch a mobile payments app, Sumeria aims to become a “simple and accessible banking super app” that will let users receive, spend and manage money anywhere in Europe, the company said on its website.

“We are convinced that technology (cloud, mobile, …) is not an end in itself, but a way to simplify life, through everyday details,” the company said on the page. “This is also how we see the current account: it should not be a trendy gadget, and above all, it should not make you captive to an application, a system, a bank. … It should solve a real problem.”

Meanwhile, research by PYMNTS Intelligence finds that a notable number of consumers in the U.S. and Australia are using apps to manage an array of activities, with banking apps emerging as the most popular.

“In a typical month, 64% of U.S. consumers and 78% of those in Australia use apps to manage their banking,” PYMNTS wrote recently.

“More than half of respondents in each country also use mobile apps to track spending and shop for groceries. This digital familiarity is likely the reason that 35% of U.S. consumers said they would be interested in using an everyday app, and 25% of their counterparts in Australia said the same,” PYMNTS wrote.

For American consumers, the interest level varies by age, with millennials and bridge millennials demonstrating particularly high levels of interest. In Australia, Generation Z to Generation X consumers both showed the highest levels of interest.