Pollinate has won the Banking Innovation of the Year award at the 2020 Future Digital Awards (FDA), recognising the most impactful financial products and services across several categories in fintech and payments.  

Pollinate’s expertise in payments, open banking, and merchant acquiring has enabled it to provide innovative solutions to banks, such as NatWest and the recently announced partnership with National Australia Bank (NAB). The Pollinate platform allows banks to understand and support their business customers more efficiently and effectively, to complete necessary checks to set them up with a payment solution quickly and provide them with a business insight tool. For a bank’s SME customers, Pollinate offers an intuitive portal with key data-driven insight tools and a wealth of data historically only available to larger businesses to understand, manage, and grow their businesses. 

A full list of winners can be found here: Future Digital Awards – 2020 winners 

The FDA judging panel recognised Pollinate’s instrumental role in its partnership with NatWest to re-imagine merchant acquiring and launch Tyl by NatWest, as well as the building of a new online payment service, Payit by NatWest, and Pollinate Orders.  

The unique partnership between Pollinate and NatWest acknowledges that banks remain at the bedrock of the modern economy – providing essential capital and expertise to support business and consumers at scale. Going beyond payments, with a great user experience and modern interface, Tyl by NatWest offers a mobile-optimised and user-friendly digital portal designed to let merchants self-serve technical and business issues quickly and effectively, and offers businesses access to a wealth of data at no extra cost. This includes average transaction value, shopping habits, local trends, peak hours, new vs. returning customers, and many more. 

Payit allows customers to make instant online payments to participating retailers without the use of a debit or credit card, resulting in a fast, fair, simple and safe payment experience. Developed in partnership with Endava for NatWest, and in pilot since 2018, Payit was the winner of the Celent Model Bank Innovation Frontier Award in 2020, in addition to the Best Open Banking initiative at the 2019 Financial Innovation Awards. Payit by NatWest leverages the UK’s Open Banking infrastructure and is one of the first to do so in payments (PISP), rather than as an information aggregator (AISP). 

Finally, the award recognises Pollinate for its quick response to the Covid-19 pandemic by launching Pollinate Orders – a digital solution that allows restaurants, pubs, and cafes to quickly turn on online order management for their customers, but with bank-grade security and standards. This includes rapid upload of menus, workflow management tools, and pick-up and delivery options.