Walley is the first payment service in Sweden to get the Safe Pay certification

Walley is a payment solution from Collector Bank that helps merchants offer flexible online and in-store payments. With over 5,000 merchants on board, Walley is the second-biggest payment service provider in the Nordics.

Being part of Collector Bank, Walley follows all the strict guidelines and rules of the payments industry.

“We have over twenty years of experience in the payments industry, and on top of that we are a bank. So security and data protection are built into our organization and processes,” says Walley’s Product Manager Philip Winberg.

“When we develop new products, it’s security by design. But communicating about security is another thing entirely.”

Everybody claims that their product is safe to use, so the really safe ones have a hard time standing out. With certification from a neutral party, Walley hopes to make it easier for customers to see and verify the safety of their payment method.

Safe Pay certification covers security from multiple angles

In Safe Pay certification, Qvik examines the applying company’s data processing practices and the security of its systems and processes. The main concern is ensuring that the consumer’s personal data is processed and stored securely.

“Applying felt like a good way to ensure that we have done our work well. Being certified proves the high standard of our product”, Winberg says.

Without certification, it is next to impossible for consumers to know which online shops are actually safe to use.

One minor bump was all we found

In the end, Walley needed to make only one minor change to their payment flow. Our Senior Payments Consultant Mikko Vahter, who issues the Safe Pay certifications, informed Winberg about the required changes on Friday, and the team at Walley had already fixed the problem by Monday.

“I’m very proud of how we operate – we are really fast in making changes”, Winberg says.

This is not always the case. Especially if the provider has legacy systems, they may only be able to deploy new features once a week or even once a month.

“Our team does deployments several times a day. If there is a problem or something that needs to be fixed, it’s important to me that we can do that at really short notice.”

More than 25,000 merchants are now certified, making BNPL safer

After its launch in February 2021, Safe Pay certification now covers most of the Finnish payments scene.

“Buy Now, Pay Later is an increasingly popular payment method. But regulations do not treat it as a payment method, because the actual payment takes place after purchase”, says Mikko Vahter from Qvik.

Buy Now, Pay Later (or BNPL) means that the customer can purchase goods and services and split the payment between one or more instalments post-purchase. From a regulatory point of view, the actual payment is made when the customer pays the invoices.

Safe Pay certification shows that Walley is a safe and responsible payment service provider that has taken all the necessary steps to protect consumers and merchants from fraud.

UK shows the way in regulation?

Authorities in the EU, Australia and the US are looking into regulating the BNPL sector, but the first concrete steps are likely to be taken in the UK.

“The United Kingdom’s FCA (Financial Conduct Authority) announced in February 2021 that it will regulate BNPL agreements as soon as possible”, Vahter says. “It will still take some time for these regulations to take effect, and we expect that it could be late 2022 or 2023 before they are in place.”

The UK is usually one step ahead of the EU when it comes to payment regulations, so it’s likely that the EU will soon take action as well. Until then, at least there’s Safe Pay certification.