Markus Best will become Managing Director of the Request to Pay platform PAYCY, a subsidiary of the Hamburg-based consulting and software company PPI AG, on 1 February. He is succeeding Dr Thorsten Völkel. The CEO of the parent company PPI AG had taken over the function on an interim basis since its foundation last year.

Markus Best looks back on more than 20 years of experience in leading positions in the international financial industry. Among other things, the graduate economist has supported European and international financial institutions owned by GE Capital and Bawag PSK in strategy and transformation projects. Most recently, Markus Best was Managing Director and Global Head of Business Operations at Hamburg Commercial Bank (HCOB), which is majority-owned by private equity investors Cerberus and JC Flowers. In addition to the day-to-day operations of eight departments, Markus Best was responsible, among other things, for the transformation and migration of HCOB's payments system.

"Request to Pay has the potential to fundamentally change payments in Europe – and with PAYCY we are offering banks the opportunity to use this development for themselves and their customers. We are pleased that we were able to win Markus Best for the important function of Managing Director. His international profile and experience on both the banking and investor sides will help us to develop PAYCY into the leading Request to Pay platform in Europe," says Dr Thorsten Völkel.

"I am very much looking forward to this exciting and challenging task. With PAYCY, banks can put the account back at the centre of the customer relationship. Together with my team, I would like to further develop PAYCY and convince more banks across Europe to join the platform," says Markus Best.

PAYCY is a white-label payments platform. Banks connected to the platform can offer their customers value-added services around fully automated billing processes. PAYCY generates a payment request directly from the invoice using the Request to Pay procedure and delivers it via the creditor's bank. The invoice recipients, in turn, can pay the receivable with just a single authorisation. The invoice is permanently linked to the payment; this creates transparency on how much was paid when and for what. As the first partner, DZ Bank has already agreed to offer this new service to its customers and cooperative banks.

Further information on PAYCY is available at https://paycy.eu/