Fire: The Future of Payments is Bespoke, Embedded, and Instant

Colm Lyon from Fire provides an inside look at the strategic movements driving the business and the wider payments landscape.

Lyon begins by emphasising Fire’s core operating principle: recognising that every single customer requires a bespoke arrangement. While the underlying product may be consistent, the implementation must be tailored to the customer’s specific business model, whether they need one account or ten thousand. This commitment necessitates Fire being an API-first company, and the necessary support to ensure seamless, easy integration for clients, which Lyon considers vital for long-term customer success.

A key topic addressed by Fire is the transformative trend of account-to-account (A2A) payments, which allows businesses to receive funds directly from their customers’ bank accounts without needing to accept cards. Lyon explains that this push payment method is a major revolution because it offers attractive benefits for businesses, including lower costs, less fraud, and greater security compared to the traditional pull method of card payments.

In the UK and Ireland, Fire serves over 1,500 clients, including some of Europe’s largest financial institutions and Lyon shares two examples that demonstrate Fire’s value: aiding a large UK bank in expanding their services to include open banking payment acceptance for merchants; and helping a scaling organisation called Just Tip to compliantly and efficiently disburse hospitality staff gratuities on a regular, integrated basis. For both clients, Fire provides the underlying technology, collection, reconciliation, and settlement of funds as a regulated party.

Looking ahead, Lyon describes the payment landscape as evolving towards embedded payments, the ability to initiate a transaction directly within a third-party application, such as tipping an artist on Spotify, without ever opening a banking app. To stay at the forefront of this embedded payments shift, Lyon explains that Fire is focused on connecting deeply into payment schemes, such as SEPA Instant, which will allow their customers to pay and get paid in as little as 10 seconds across Europe.

Lyon concludes by outlining three major interconnected forces driving this transformation in the financial world:

• Regulation: New rules are opening up access for non-bank firms to join payment schemes and enabling consumers and businesses to access their bank accounts outside of their primary bank with consent.
• Technology: The pervasive presence of APIs and embedded access means payment functionality is being integrated directly into third-party applications, offering real-time data like seeing a bank balance on a Point of Sale (POS) device.
• Instant Expectations: Both individuals and businesses now demand and expect instant payment and real-time confirmation.