Accepting BANCOMAT Pay as a merchant

BANCOMAT S.p.A. does not sign merchants itself. Its own business page tells an online merchant to contact its bank to integrate BANCOMAT Pay, so acceptance runs through an acquiring bank or a PSP. Online that is a redirect or a phone number field at checkout. In store the cashier selects BANCOMAT Pay in the POS menu and the terminal shows a dynamic QR code for the shopper to scan.

There is therefore no direct price to compare against. What you pay is the rate of the bank or PSP that carries the method, and the published rates sit far apart, as the pricing section below shows.

The shopper side is Italy. PPRO and Antom both list Italy as the only consumer country and the euro as the only currency. BANCOMAT names Spain, Portugal, Andorra and Greece only for sending money to friends, not for paying a merchant. The service is already active in the banking apps of Intesa Sanpaolo, Intesa Sanpaolo Private Banking, isybank and UniCredit, and other shoppers activate it in the BANCOMAT app.

The merchant side is wider. In the index Mollie offers BANCOMAT Pay to merchants established in 24 European countries, and Antom to merchant entities in the EEA, the United Kingdom, the United States, Singapore and Hong Kong. A merchant outside Italy can therefore accept it, and the volume it brings depends on the share of Italian shoppers in your checkout.

UniCredit's information sheet for e-commerce acquiring does more than print 1.75%. It states that the price contains an interchange fee of 0.20% and a scheme fee of 0.05%. UniCredit's in-store sheet shows 0.10% interchange and 0.08% scheme fee in the same way. Everything above those two components is the acquirer's own margin.

On 1 million euro of online BANCOMAT Pay volume at 1.75%, the price is 17,500 euro a year. Interchange accounts for 2,000 euro and the scheme fee for 500 euro. The remaining 15,000 euro is what UniCredit keeps, and it is the only part a negotiation can move. The example is illustrative; your quoted rate decides what you actually pay. Ask your acquirer for the same split in writing, and negotiate the margin, not the total.

PPRO and Antom both list recurring payments as not supported, and Antom also lists tokenised payments as not supported. On those routes BANCOMAT Pay therefore carries no subscription and no stored credential. PPRO lists the maximum amount as varying by bank, so a large basket can fail on the shopper's own bank limit rather than on any risk rule of yours.

Both points are reasons to keep a card or another method next to it in the checkout. For a subscription, offer BANCOMAT Pay for the first payment only if a second method takes over the renewals.

What you pay for BANCOMAT Pay is set in your agreement with your acquirer or PSP, not by the scheme. Start by establishing whether you are overpaying your PSP, and where BANCOMAT Pay is a material share of your Italian volume, ask for the interchange and scheme fee split before you renew.

Relevant markets: Italy