The VIMpay project

Horizon 2020 is the biggest EU research and innovation programme. Almost €80 billion of funding is available over seven years (2014 to 2020) – in addition to the private and national public investment that this money will attract. Horizon 2020 will help to achieve smart, sustainable and inclusive economic growth. The goal is to ensure Europe produces world-class science and technology, removes barriers to innovation and makes it easier for the public and private sectors to work together in delivering solutions to big challenges facing our society.

As part of the Horizon 2020 programme, the European Commission is hand-picking potentially disruptive businesses to invest and support as part of the SME Instrument. In 2015 petaFuel qualified for funding through this programme for its Open Disruptive Innovation, VIMpay.

It is the aim of the project to establish the payment product VIMpay for the European market. VIMpay is a mobile based payment solution that will enable smartphone users in Europe to participate in cashless transactions by consolidating card-based, SEPA and mobile payments. VIMpay is an innovative and disruptive solution as it will enable smartphone users to securely and conveniently make payments without the need for a bank account. Unlike most other solutions in the market, it is built upon existing European payment standards like SEPA or credit card payments. Therefore VIMpay will additionally allow the easy integration of new payment solutions.

With foreign payment services from U.S. companies (such as Apple and Google) pushing into the European market, a product is required that offers both usability from an end customer perspective and compliance to European regulations to ensure European leadership in the payment market. petaFuel is in a unique position to introduce such a product to the market and as such could be a highly valuable stakeholder for technology companies newly trying to enter the payment market: It has already established a payment infrastructure and corresponding business processes and brought proof-of-concepts to market that already demonstrate the core functionalities of the product. For the VIMpay project these payment infrastructure and business processes will be extended and integrated to provide a solution that ideally caters for all payment needs of end users in the European SEPA region.