Open banking payments
Account-to-Account Payments (Pay by Bank): Open Banking for High-Volume and High-Risk Merchants
Boldrails is a licensed payment provider that acquires account-to-account payments, also called open banking payments, Pay by Bank or A2A, directly from your customer's bank account with no card network in the path. We serve high-risk and high-volume merchants across emerging markets, with onboarding in 3 to 14 days.
- No card in the path
- Approval in 3 to 14 days
- Licensed where we serve
- Settles T+1 or T+2
Onboarding takes 3 to 14 days, depending on your case.
Last updated: 6 August 2026
Key takeaways
- No card network sits in the path, so there is no card interchange and no card-scheme chargeback mechanic.
- The payer's leg completes in seconds. Your settlement is a separate, slower event at T+1 or T+2.
- Recurring collection runs on Variable Recurring Payments, and commercial coverage is limited because non-sweeping VRP was never mandated.
The method
What is an account-to-account payment?
An account-to-account payment moves money straight from your customer's bank account into yours. No credit card or debit card sits in the middle. The payer approves the transfer inside their own banking app, and the money travels over the local real-time payments scheme.
You will meet the same method under four names. Open banking payments, Pay by Bank, account-to-account and A2A all describe it. Open banking is the regulated data and initiation layer that makes the transfer possible. The payment itself is the account-to-account payment. The UK's Payment Systems Regulator treats open banking as the enabler of these payments rather than another word for them, and defines the method as money moving between bank accounts without intermediaries such as credit or debit cards.
Two shapes exist. A push payment is a one-off, where the payer authorises each transfer. A pull payment is recurring, where the payer consents once and the collection repeats. This page covers push initiation at checkout. Recurring pulls run on a separate mechanism, and we cover its limits below.
The flow
How does a Pay by Bank payment work?
Four steps, start to finish.
- 1
Your customer picks Pay by Bank at checkout and chooses their bank.
- 2
They approve the payment inside their banking app with a fingerprint, a face scan or a PIN. That step is strong customer authentication.
- 3
Their bank sends the money over the local instant scheme. In the UK, Pay by Bank runs on Faster Payments. In the euro area it runs on SEPA Instant Credit Transfer.
- 4
We confirm the payment and reconcile it against your order.
Instant bank payments feel simple at the checkout because one regulated role does the work behind them. A payment initiation service provider, or PISP, connects the merchant to the payer's bank over open banking APIs, which is how Open Banking Limited describes the role.
In the United Kingdom, payment initiation is a payment service under the Payment Services Regulations, and firms apply to the Financial Conduct Authority to provide it.
Boldrails is a licensed payment provider. We hold the necessary licences required in the markets we serve. Initiation maps to the ISO 20022 pain.001 schema over a RESTful JSON API, and we notify your systems by webhook.
Schemes and currencies
Which schemes and currencies an account-to-account payment runs on
Every account-to-account payment lands on a domestic rail, and the rail decides the currency, the speed and what happens to a refund. There is no single global open banking regime. The UK and the euro area run mandated access frameworks. Elsewhere, initiation runs over direct bank APIs on top of the domestic instant rail. The table below documents those schemes and their operators. It is scheme documentation, not a coverage claim.
| Scheme | Currency | How initiation happens | Settlement window | Regulator or scheme operator |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Faster Payments | GBP | Mandated open banking access framework | Payer leg in seconds; merchant settlement T+1 or T+2 on gateway rails | Pay.UK operates the scheme; the Bank of England oversees it |
| SEPA Instant Credit Transfer | EUR | Mandated open banking access framework | Payer leg within 10 seconds; merchant settlement T+1 or T+2 on gateway rails | European Payments Council scheme, under Regulation (EU) 2024/886 |
| Bacs Direct Debit | GBP | Pull collection on a mandate, not open banking initiation | About 3 working days | Pay.UK |
| Pix, alongside Open Finance Brasil | BRL | Domestic instant rail, with an open finance framework beside it | Payer leg in seconds | Banco Central do Brasil |
| NIBSS Instant Payment | NGN | Direct bank API initiation over the domestic instant rail | Payer leg in seconds; merchant settlement T+1 or T+2 on gateway rails | NIBSS operates the rail; the Central Bank of Nigeria regulates the banks |
Two of those figures carry conditions worth stating. A SEPA Instant Credit Transfer is capped at 100,000 euro per transaction under the European Payments Council scheme rulebook. Under Regulation (EU) 2024/886, as summarised by KPMG and by the law firm Bird & Bird, payment service providers in the euro area had to be able to receive instant euro transfers from 9 January 2025 and to send them from 9 October 2025, within ten seconds, at charges no higher than a standard SEPA credit transfer. Later phases apply outside the euro area. Faster Payments carries its own scheme limit, but individual providers set lower per-transaction ceilings, so the scheme figure is not the figure a merchant receives.
The UK and EU rows above are market context. They describe how the category works in its home regime, not where we collect. Boldrails collects and settles across Africa, LATAM, Asia and MENA, and Nigeria is one of the markets where we collect and pay out over bank-account rails. The canonical list of every market, method and rail we serve is our acceptance index.
The per-scheme detail behind this table, including refund mechanics scheme by scheme, sits in our open banking coverage register.
Settlement and refunds
How long does settlement take, and can you refund an account-to-account payment?
Two events get conflated across this category, and they are not the same event. The payer-to-payee leg completes in seconds on an instant scheme. Your settlement is separate and slower, at T+1 or T+2 on gateway rails. A payment that shows as complete in your customer's banking app has not yet reached your account.
Refunds carry a constraint most providers bury. A refund on an account-to-account payment is available on managed settlement only. Where settlement is direct, the money lands in your own bank account and no processor remains in the path to reverse it. Global Payments documents the same managed-versus-direct split in its published developer material.
The regulators are blunt about what is still missing. The Payment Systems Regulator lists dispute processes as one of four areas needing improvement before account-to-account payments work for retail, alongside functional capability, sufficient access and reliability, and competitive pricing.
Open Banking Limited states on its own site that consumer protections differ from card payments and that the framework is still evolving. We would rather you read that here than discover it after your first disputed transaction.
Cards versus A2A
Cards versus account-to-account: there is no chargeback
There is no card chargeback mechanic on an account-to-account payment; the dispute path is the payer's bank, not the card scheme. That cuts both ways, so here is both directions.
| Card payment | Account-to-account payment | |
|---|---|---|
| Dispute mechanism | Card-scheme chargeback | None; the payer raises it with their bank |
| Cost driver | Interchange plus scheme fees | No card interchange in the cost base |
| Authentication | 3-D Secure at checkout | Strong customer authentication in the payer's banking app |
| Recourse route | The card scheme | The payer's own bank |
| Reported fraud rate, March 2024 to September 2025 | 0.045% wider-industry average | 0.013% of open banking payments by volume |
For you, that means no card-style chargeback exposure and no interchange. For your customer, recourse runs through their own bank. In the UK that recourse is carried by the Payment Systems Regulator's mandatory reimbursement regime for authorised push payment fraud, in force since 7 October 2024. Under that regime the sending firm must reimburse an eligible victim within 5 business days, the cost is split equally with the receiving firm, and the maximum reimbursement is 85,000 pounds per claim. The law firm Freshfields confirms the equal cost split and the five-day deadline.
The fraud figures are the counterweight. Open banking payments accounted for 0.013% of transactions by volume against a 0.045% wider-industry average between March 2024 and September 2025, per Open Banking Limited's Financial Crime report update of December 2025. Read it as a sample: the monitor draws on account providers representing just over 60% of open banking payment volumes.
What we found when we put the two regulators side by side
Every provider in this category sells account-to-account payments on the absence of chargebacks. The UK's own payments regulator lists dispute processes as one of four unsolved barriers to the method, and the mechanism for recurring commercial collection was never mandated at all. Both of those facts are published by UK authorities, and neither appears on the marketing pages that lead with the chargeback saving. That is the trade you are actually making, and it is a good trade for a high-risk merchant carrying card chargeback exposure today. It is a worse one for a subscription business that needs a guaranteed recurring pull.
Recurring collection
Can you take recurring payments over open banking?
The honest answer is a qualified yes, and the qualification matters more than the yes.
Variable Recurring Payments are the open banking mechanism for recurring collection. The Competition and Markets Authority mandated them for sweeping only. Sweeping means the automatic transfer of money between a customer's own accounts, such as moving surplus cash into a savings account. Open Banking Limited states that non-sweeping Variable Recurring Payments were never mandated, so the nine largest UK banks are not obliged to provide them. No provider can promise universal commercial coverage today, and anyone who does is selling you a roadmap.
The regulator agrees this gap is open. The Payment Systems Regulator names functional capability as its first barrier and includes retailer support for subscription payments in it. A standard Pay by Bank payment is single-use by design.
For scheduled outbound money, use our payout API.
For collecting and reconciling at scale, use multi-currency IBANs.
Who we accept
Who we accept, and what open banking is not
We acquire and settle account-to-account payments for high-volume and high-risk merchants. That includes forex and CFD brokers, crypto businesses, regulated gaming operators, marketplaces and cross-border e-commerce. If another provider declined you, tell us what they said. We underwrite the case, not the category. Onboarding takes 3 to 14 days, depending on your case.
Forex and CFD brokers
Crypto businesses
Regulated gaming operators
Marketplaces
Cross-border e-commerce
High-volume subscription and top-up flows
Declined somewhere else, or running a vertical most providers will not quote? Send us the case and we will tell you what we can do.
How pricing works
There is no public rate card for this method, and no competitor in this category publishes one either. An account-to-account payment carries no card interchange, so the card scheme leaves your cost base entirely. Your rate and your limits are set per merchant and confirmed at onboarding.
One thing this page is not about
Open banking here means a payment method for collecting money from your customers. It is not the same as opening a business bank account. If what you need is an account in your company's name, that is our business accounts page.
Gaming operators should start with our banking page for gaming. The two use nearly the same words and do opposite jobs.
Get approved
Start collecting over bank rails
Send us your business, your markets and your volumes. We come back with what we can support and what your onboarding looks like.
Primary sources
- Payment Systems Regulator, account-to-account payments
- Payment Systems Regulator, APP scams reimbursement
- Open Banking Limited, Pay by Bank
- Open Banking Limited, Variable Recurring Payments
- Open Banking Limited, Financial Crime report update, December 2025
- Financial Conduct Authority, payment services and e-money regulations
FAQ
Account-to-account payments, answered
Last updated: 6 August 2026