New challenge for Xavier Niel and his Iliad group. Ten years after having dynamited the French telecoms market with a strategy of offers at bargain prices, the French billionaire is indeed landing on the payment market. In this context, the Stancer company was created in 2018, but it is only now that its potential will be fully expressed.
Last week, the company’s Twitter account announced the arrival of “the payment revolution”. In the wake of this tweet enigmatic, rumors were rife around the ambitions of this subsidiary of Iliad, which has won the approval of the Prudential Control and Resolution Authority (ACPR) as a payment institution. It then seemed certain that Free was going to sign its arrival on the neobank market, five years after the launch of Orange Bank, which has just changed bosses while the French operator’s mobile bank has already lost nearly 880 million euros since 2017.
However, Stancer finally chose to have a positioning close to Square by unveiling its first offer aimed at merchants. Launched by submarine a year ago, the company officially takes off today. “At Iliad, we were tired of paying exorbitant fees to be able to collect our subscribers. That’s how Stancer was born. It’s a fairer payment solution. We first created it for ourselves , and today, after years of testing and tweaking it, we want to make life easier for other professionals.”, explains Xavier Niel, the founder of Iliad. This new fintech is led by Aurélien Beaujean, payment engineer, and George Owen, business lawyer and entrepreneur.
Called StancerPay, the company’s first solution allows merchants to cash out their customers, whether in-store or online. In this context, Stancer offers physical collection with a Verifone mobile payment terminal, and online collection via an API. It is also able to generate a payment link to carry out transactions by SMS, email, QR code or even on social networks.
Claiming an attractive price list, the company “estimates that the merchant saves around 50% with Stancer on a €30 cashout, and up to 80% on a physical cashout at €2”. To date, the French fintech claims 200,000 transactions managed every day and more than a billion euros processed for its customers over a year.
Stance in the footsteps of Square
Now that Stancer has made its public launch, the company hopes to entice more traders. But the latter are also the target of Square, which landed on the French market in September 2021. The American mobile payment giant also announced last May the launch in France of two new tools (Square Register and Square for retailers ), which should help sellers optimize their business.
But if the company, launched by Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter, still operates in France under the Square brand, it adopted a new name on a global scale by becoming Block in December 2021 to mark its ambitions in the blockchain and cryptocurrencies. A segment which is not yet explored by Stancer but which could give ideas to Xavier Niel. As a reminder, the latter had invested in Facebook’s cryptocurrency project, finally abandoned by the American group at the start of the year.