French payments app Lydia has launched a European banking super app called Sumeria.
The company will invest more than €100 million and hire 400 people in three years to become a major player in this sector in France before expanding to other parts of Europe, Lydia said in a Wednesday (May 15) post on LinkedIn, translated from the French by the platform.
“Good news, Sumeria is now offering a simple, fast and elegant online account, but above all with a 4% interest,” the company said in the post, per the translation. “In addition to our current approval for payments, we are still applying to the French banking regulator for a credit institution license, in order to write the future pages of this new chapter.”
While Lydia was launched in 2013 to offer a mobile payments app, Sumeria aims to become a “simple and accessible banking super app” that will enable users to receive, spend and manage money anywhere in Europe, according to the “About” page on the company’s website.
“We are convinced that technology (cloud, mobile, …) is not an end in itself, but a way to simplify life, through everyday details,” the company said on the page. “This is also how we see the current account: it should not be a trendy gadget, and above all, it should not make you captive to an application, a system, a bank. … It should solve a real problem.”
The announcement of Sumeria comes about a month after the company said in a press release that it was launching a new application called Lydia that is dedicated to payments and reimbursements between friends.
The original app, which had expanded to include other functionalities like cards and accounts, was renamed Lydia Accounts.
Since its launch as a peer-to-peer (P2P) payments app in 2013, Lydia expanded to become a mobile financial services platform that offers loans, savings accounts, cryptocurrency trading and other services to its more than 7 million users, PYMNTS reported in January.
“What [users] want is something that is on par with Spotify and Airbnb and all these major category-defining companies in other sectors,” Lydia CEO Cyril Chiche told PYMNTS in an interview posted in January 2022. “We don’t have this for banks, and we need one, and we actually want a multiple of them.”
