Voice Commerce, the innovative financial services group, today announced that it has become the first fully authorised Payment Institution to qualify under the new 2nd Electronic Money Directive in the UK since it was introduced in May 2011.
In addition, Voice Commerce is pleased to announce that the RBS Special Opportunities Fund has made a substantial growth capital investment to accelerate the Company's development.
Voice Commerce received authorisation to perform payments services from the Financial Services Authority (FSA) under the Payment Services Directive (PSD) in November 2009 and since then has become a principal member of VISA and MasterCard, and a member of the UK Payments Council.
Qualification under the 2nd Electronic Money Directive enables Voice Commerce to operate all its card acquiring and card issuing services, including electronic money, from a single legal entity using its Cashflows brand, consolidating its various regulated activities into a single business account for its customers within the European Economic Area.
Nick Ogden, Chairman and CEO of the Voice Commerce Group, said: "Over the past year we have been consolidating all our payment activities, merchants acquiring, e-money and prepaid card issuing under our Cashflows® brand in anticipation of completing the regulatory transition to 2EMD. During 2012, we will be increasing the range of complementary integrated services available from our Cashflows® business account which, in addition to payment card acquiring, includes mobile app support, QR code creation, pay and collect services and the VoicePay mobile payment solution."
"2011 has been a very important consolidation year for us, and means that 2012 will be a very exciting year for our customers. We have adopted the strap line, "Cashflows, the most important word in your business", to emphasis the challenges facing all companies and the services that we are developing to help their business operate more efficiently . As a Group, we continue to rapidly grow and are currently looking at a number of acquisitions following a recent private equity investment into the business by the RBS Special Opportunities Fund which provides us witth access to significant acquisition capital, but only for the right deals," Ogden concluded.