Pulse of Payments - Kathryn McCall, Chief Legal Officer at Trustly

As we continue this month with our focus on Open Banking, our pulse is on Trustly – a well-established open banking platform that enables merchant commerce, via ACH, in a manner that reduces fraud and promotes a more seamless payments flow.  Today, I talk with Chief Legal Officer Kathryn McCall about Trustly as both a rapidly growing company and a true leader in our industry. For those of you that may not know, the Trustly brand was launched in the U.S through a merger with local platform PayWithMyBank. To say that this partnership was well-matched is an understatement as the already-established Trustly brand facilitated a significant growth spurt for the company’s overall market share. And since 2018, Trustly has grown exponentially from just 20 employees to 300! Hearing Kathryn talk about the nuances of this merger is a fascinating glimpse into the difference between the U.S. and EU ecosystems. Both are well-established, but the EU is much more effortlessly driven towards the open banking concept largely because they were early adopters of the bank transfer model. Their ecosystem has been thriving on it for decades. The U.S. ecosystem, on the other hand, still gravitates largely towards card and (though less prevalent now) check payments. Not to mention, the challenges the EU presents with cross-border rules and regulations offer an interesting spin on cross-border commerce.  Tune in to hear how Trustly has had to adapt in order to establish and grow their global footprint, as well as how the benefits of open banking differ from the merchant versus the consumer side, and what the future looks like as we charge forward towards automation and digitization.