Lloyds Offers New Merchant Tools Via Expanded FreedomPay Partnership

Lloyds Bank said it has expanded its partnership with consumer-centric commerce platform FreedomPay.

The British banking giant announced Wednesday (Oct. 11) that merchants using its Bank Cardnet now have access to FreedomPay’s payment processing capabilities.

“The fully integrated, patented technology offers Lloyds Bank Cardnet customers the flexibility to process payments across borders, key sectors, point of sales and merchant service providers,” Lloyds said in a news release.

The release noted that FreedomPay’s platform is an end-to-end cloud-based solution that offers fast, secure payments solutions to merchants while also supporting payment methods such as mobile wallet functionality.

The expanded partnership is happening at a time when the cost of payment acceptance is top of mind for merchants, as Link Money CEO Eric Shoykhet told PYMNTS in August.

Merchants need to “shift their narrative” about payments overall, Shoykhet said, arguing it’s no longer a good practice to “have every payment method in the checkout cart and give customers all the optionality for whatever they want.”

Many merchants, before macroeconomic pressures set in, might have just decided to pay whatever costs would be in the offing to ensure that a customer’s preferences were met, that transactions wouldn’t fail, and that the sale would close.

“Now the mentality has shifted to ‘how do we actually optimize the cost of payments and find cheaper alternatives if they exist?’” he said.

Last month, FreedomPay announced it was expanding its collaboration with merchant acquirer Worldpay to provide “integrated payments and omnichannel technology” for businesses in industries like retail and hospitality, as the companies said in a news release.

The updated collaboration will happen in a phased rollout to eventually cover the North American, Asia-Pacific (APAC) and European, Middle Eastern and North African (EMEA) markets, “enabling Worldpay’s global customers to benefit from improved payments technology across a number of consumer touchpoints.”

This year has also seen FreedomPay integrate Visa’s network tokenization capabilities with its global identity and tokenization framework.

This integration permits network tokens across card brands, allowing merchants to comply with data and privacy regulations, while also qualifying for lower interchange rates on some transactions.

“By partnering with Visa for network tokenization, FreedomPay will provide merchants with more flexibility and geographic coverage, including in harder-to-access regions, when managing customer and card data,” FreedomPay technology chief David Knowlton said at the time.