Online trading largely bypasses the payment service of German banks.
(Photo: dpa)
Frankfurt Paydirekt gets a new boss. After five years at the helm, Christian von Hammel-Bonten is leaving the German banks’ online payment service at the end of the year. He is followed by the savings bank manager Henning vorm Walde, as Paydirekt announced on Wednesday morning.
Vorm Walde is an experienced manager with key competencies in digitization and innovation topics, said Torsten Daenert, Chairman of the Paydirekt Board of Directors. He will “substantially drive forward the transformation and growth that has been undertaken”.
Vorm Walde is already responsible for Paydirekt at the German savings banks. He is Managing Director of GIZS, which manages the Paydirekt holding of the Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe. GIZS shareholders are the Landesbank Baden-Württemberg, the Landesbank Hessen-Thüringen and the Deutsche Sparkassenverlag. Before joining the Sparkassen-Finanzgruppe, vorm Walde worked as a management consultant.
The German banks fell far short of their big ambitions with Paydirekt, which started in 2015. Paydirekt was supposed to stand up to the US payment service PayPal, but it only plays a minor role as a payment option in e-commerce. The company is owned by the savings banks, the cooperative banks, Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank.
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At the end of 2020, Paydirekt was merged with competitor Giropay. The payment method is now only called Giropay, the company behind it is still Paydirekt. Giropay was founded in 2005.
The transaction volume of Paydirekt is so low
In 2021, i.e. after the merger with Giropay, Paydirekt processed 17.8 million transactions. The transaction volume was a good 1.5 billion euros. Most of the payments are likely to have gone through Giropay. Giropay already processed one million transactions a month two years ago, as it stated at the time.
In 2020, Paydirekt, at that time without the Giropay reinforcement, only made 3.3 million payments. The transaction volume was almost 290 million euros.
This is minimal given the turnover in German online retail. According to the HDE trade association, it was almost 73 billion euros net in 2020 and almost 87 billion euros in 2021. In addition, the ticket sales of Deutsche Bahn, for example, an important Paydirekt customer, are not included in the HDE figures.
More: Paydirekt lags far behind Paypal