Lydia, a French payment startup will be adding new financial features to its payment app later this year. The company is adding cryptocurrency and stock trading features that will allow its users to be able to buy, sell and hold shares of European and American companies, as well as cryptocurrencies and ETFs.
The startup is one of France’s fast-rising companies in the payments space and adding these new features will be the key to unlocking its next level of growth. The startup started its platform as a peer-to-peer payment platform that allows users to send and receive money, and over time grew to accommodate debit cards, donations, loans, cashback, IBANs, etc. The company operates like Venmo or CashApp that attracts potential users with their peer-to-peer feature before unleashing their other numerous financial features.
Lydia’s platform currently has about 5.5 million users. It works alongside other financial companies to provide its products. For instance, it introduced a savings account that’ll offer 0.6 percent interest a few months ago. The savings account is powered by Cashbee and although the interest isn’t much, it’s far better than leaving it in one’s main Lydia account.
By introducing stock and crypto trading options, Lydia plans to make the process of acquiring stock and crypto easy. “If you want to buy assets right now, it’s too complicated. Even just accessing those markets is complicated. It takes you several days to register and verify your account. After that, you have to send money. And then, there are minimum amounts”, Lydia co-founder and CEO Cyril Chiche explained. Lydia plans on making the registration process easy and seamless; all users will need would be a few clicks or taps, no need to upload new photos or an account with separate passwords. Trading accounts would be extensions of already existing accounts for users who already have accounts.
Lydia, alongside Bitpanda in a partnership, will offer French, European and American shares. Users can buy shares with as little as €1. They will also be able to buy, sell and invest in cryptocurrencies as well as buy precious metals such as gold and silver, once the feature becomes available later this year.
Speaking about its partnership with Bitpanda, Lydia’s CEO said that “We met with a lot of potential partners and we realized that we had a lot of things in common”. The partnership between both parties promises to be a good one as both can promote each other’s services on their platforms.
While both companies have agreed to share the revenue that comes from trading on the Lydia platform, all assets accessible on Bitpanda’s platform will be accessible through Lydia’s platform.
