Small business payments fintech SumUp has launched personal banking accounts as it seeks to broaden its scope to a “complete financial ecosystem” for merchants and consumers.
The account aims to reward spending at small and medium-sized businesses by offering 5% cashback on purchases made in SumUp’s merchant network, much of which is composed of smaller businesses and independent service providers.
“We see this intersection between helping merchants to grow their own businesses through providing them with tooling and support and helping drive consumers to them,” chief commercial officer Luke Griffiths tells Sifted.
SumUp is the latest of a number of large fintechs that have added bank accounts to their fintech offering. Payments giant Wise launched everyday bank accounts in the UK in March. Buy-now-pay-later provider Klarna introduced banking back in 2021.
Competing with neobanks
These fintechs arrive in a crowded neobank space with large European players like Revolut, Monzo and N26 that have already captured decent chunks of the market.
Griffiths says cashback and loyalty rewards are a primary way SumUp is hoping to compete with existing players.
The company also plans to leverage its two-sided incentivisation play to stand out. In addition to the consumer rewards, it is also offering merchants no fees for transactions with SumUp consumer users.
“The way we look at it is that it can be rewarding on both sides and ultimately SumUp wins,” Griffiths says. “More merchants means more consumers and more transactions flowing through our platform on the merchant side. Then more happy consumers means that they're going to try and search for more SumUp locations to get cashback.”
Additionally, the scaleup is relying on what Griffith calls “Saturday morning energy”, which refers to the keenness people feel to support local entrepreneurs when they have more time on their hands.
Consumer roadmap
The bank accounts are part of SumUp’s broader consumer roadmap, which started with the launch of SumUp Pay in Ireland back in 2022. The payment product allowed consumers 0.5% cashback on all spending once they created an account on the SumUp Pay app.
It has now been rebranded to the SumUp app and expanded to the full bank account with the 5% cashback on SumUp merchants alongside other perks like 2% cashback at supermarkets and 0.5% on every other purchase, loyalty rewards at participating businesses, spending insights and budgeting tools.
Initially launched in the UK, Ireland, Germany, France, Italy and Spain, SumUp eventually hopes to expand the consumer offering to all 38 of its markets.
The fintech is also reportedly considering applying for banking licenses in the EU and the UK and has applied for one in Brazil.
Griffith says lending and investments are areas SumUp would be keen to develop consumer products in and a banking license would “make sense to enable that”.
