In their drive to make the economy in Europe more efficient the politicians decided one route would be to introduce competition to the established banks in a number of business activities. One area that attracted attention was the world of payments as the cost of processing payments is seen purely as an overhead on any business and not contributing in any way to the development of that business. To this end a new type of regulated company, a Payment Institution, was introduced in 2009. Nuapay is licenced and regulated as a full Payment Institution.