Iliad, the telecom company owned by French billionaire and startup investor Xavier Niel, is launching a payment subsidiary called Stancer. The team has focused on one thing in particular — lowering transaction fees as much as possible.
While French retailers, online shops and businesses can use Stancer starting today, Iliad has been using Stancer for many of its activities, including as the payments processing platform to bill Free’s mobile and internet subscribers. Stancer currently processes 200,000 transactions per day — it represents 6 million transactions per month and €1.3 billion in transaction volume.
Stancer is both an online and offline payment company. When it comes to online payments, Stancer clients can accept card payments as well as SEPA direct debits. It works with both one-off payments and recurring payments. For larger amounts and special use cases, Stancer also supports incoming bank transfers via SEPA.
The startup charges 0.7% in variable fee and a €0.15 fee on card transactions with cards issued in the European Economic Area. As a comparison, Stripe charges 1.4% + €0.25 for European Economic Area card payments.
SEPA direct debits on Stancer are a bit cheaper than card payments, with a 0.4% variable fee and a €0.10 fixed fee. There are many ways to accept Stancer payments — an API, a pop-in or iframe, a Stancer-hosted payment page and CMS plugins.
As for brick-and-mortar stores, Stancer can send you a Verifone payment terminal so you can start accepting card payments in your shop. Stancer charges 0.7% + €0.07 on European Economic Area card transactions via the terminal. This is also quite competitive.
If you don’t have a lot of in-store transactions or if you don’t have a website with a checkout flow, you can also create a payment link to collect payments from your customer’s phone. This link can be shared in an email or a WhatsApp message. You can also generate a QR code for payments in store.
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Stancer is still a work in progress. For instance, the company is still working on Apple Pay and Google Pay support for online payments. Similarly, it focuses on the French market for now.
But it’s an interesting new venture for Iliad. Stancer is already teasing more products down the road, such as split payments and Stancer-designed online shops. Arguably, it’s never going to be as big or successful as Stripe, but the payment market is also a huge industry.
