Statement w.r.t. the press release of the National Bank of Belgium

ANTWERP - 20 June 2018. Today the National Bank of Belgium reported that POM "does not have a licence for the provision of payment services" (as stipulated in the Law of 11 March 2018 on the status and supervision of payment institutions).

With regards to this statement, we wish to clarify a number of things:

• The payment services to which the Bank refers are only a small part (up to 10 percent of our transactions) of our services. It only concerns payments in the POM app to suppliers with whom we do not have a contractual relationship. This is the free service with which a POM user can pay invoices by taking a photo or forwarding an email.
  
  
• Most of the transactions via POM are direct invoice payments to companies with whom we have a contractual relationship (these are about 50 companies). In this case, POM acts as a technical intermediary between the company and the payment service provider, for which, according to the provisions of the law of 11 March 2018, a payment institution licence is not required.
  
  
• For the activities subject to licensing, we submitted an application file in December last year after consultation with the National Bank. In the meantime, POM and the Bank have been in contact at regular intervals. Last week we made another proposal in this respect. We note that the National Bank now presents us with a "fait accompli".

However, we do everything in our power to obtain the necessary licence for the activities which require a licence as quickly as possible in order to guarantee the continuity of our service to our users.

We are available to provide more information and clarifications.

Yours sincerely,

Johannes Vermeire & Tom Totté, co-founders of POM.