Eir’s owner enters the payments sector with new venture Stancer

28 Sep 2022

Xavier Niel speaks at an event in 2009. Image: Olivier Ezratty/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Stancer has been the payments tool serving Iliad, Xavier Niel’s telecoms company, since 2018. It is now being rolled out to the French market and beyond.

Iliad, the French telecoms giant that owns Eir, is launching a new payments offering called Stancer.

Stancer is a subsidiary of Iliad, which was founded and is owned by French businessman Xavier Niel. The new payments business has already begun offering services in its native France, and aims to expand to other countries where Iliad is based soon.

Stancer was initially created in 2018 as a payments service for Iliad by some of the company’s leading engineers. It is now being offered to retailers and online shops in France with a focus on lowering transaction fees.

It will process transactions in shops and online, and its services are being offered to customers without the need for a subscription. It is still working on adding Google Pay and Apple Pay support, TechCrunch reports, and has begun testing advanced features and products such as split payments and online shops.

According to Niel, who announced plans to take a majority stake in Irish telecoms company Eir in 2017, Stancer was created as a “fairer” payments service when Iliad was tired of “paying exorbitant fees” to be able to collect payments from its subscribers.

He added that following several years of testing and refinements, it was ready to launch.

“We first created it for ourselves, and today, after having tested and refined it for several years, we want to simplify the lives of other professionals. Stancer was created by merchants, for merchants. Its offer therefore perfectly meets their challenges and their needs.”

Stancer’s CEO, George Owen, said he is confident the company can carve out its own corner in the already crowded payments market. He added that Stancer’s aim is to be “Iliad’s alter ego in the world of payments”.

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Xavier Niel. Image: Olivier Ezratty/Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Blathnaid O’Dea was a Careers reporter at Silicon Republic until 2024.

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