Most conversations about Pay by Bank focus on economics.
Lower costs than cards. Faster settlement. Different commercial models.
Those things matter to merchants and platforms, but they are invisible to the customer deciding how to pay.
What the customer experiences is the payment journey itself. If that journey feels clear and predictable, people use it again. If it feels uncertain or slow, they return to the methods they already know.
This matters because Pay by Bank is no longer experimental infrastructure. Open banking in the UK now serves more than sixteen million users, with billions of API calls being made every month across the ecosystem.¹
Adoption at that scale means the discussion is shifting. The question is no longer whether the technology works. The question is whether the payment experience is good enough to form habits.
The moment of choice
The point where a customer selects a payment method carries more weight than many merchants expect.
Customers decide quickly. If the next step looks unfamiliar or requires explanation, many will simply choose another option (or even worse, another merchant).
In the latest update to the Android version of our Wonderful One merchant app we have introduced NFC-triggered bank selection - we'd have done the same for iOS too, but Apple doesn't allow it. A merchant's customer can now simply tap their phone on the merchant app and move directly to choosing their bank. QR codes remain available as a fallback, but the main interaction now follows behaviour people already recognise from contactless payments.
Reducing steps matters. When the first interaction feels natural, customers continue without hesitation.
Bank selection
Bank selection remains one of the most sensitive points in a Pay by Bank flow.
Customers expect to recognise their bank immediately and proceed without searching or scrolling. When recognition takes too long, the journey slows down and confidence drops.
Implementations that perform well tend to treat this step as a product decision rather than a technical requirement. The ordering of banks, visual recognition and response time all influence how the payment feels. Which bank did your customer use last time? Make sure it's at the top of the list.
Small design decisions here can noticeably affect completion rates.
App-to-app journeys
Another development shaping Pay by Bank experiences is app-to-app deep linking.
Open banking standards already support redirection from a merchant or third-party application directly into a customer’s banking app, passing the payment request and authentication context with it.²
When the payment starts inside a consumer application, for example a rewards app or a retailer’s own customer app, that changes the structure of the journey.
The application can remember the customer’s preferred bank and take them directly to authorisation with a single tap.
The customer is not searching for their bank at the point of payment. They are confirming a transaction with a bank they already use and trust.
For merchants and platforms building customer-facing applications, this approach can significantly reduce friction while preserving explicit authorisation through the bank.
Introducing NFC-triggered bank selection alongside the existing QR flow illustrates how Pay by Bank starts to support repeat behaviour rather than one-off payments.
Commercial Variable Recurring Payments (cVRP), which we prefer to call Smart Debits(!), allow a customer to grant consent once and then make repeat purchases without repeating the bank selection and authentication steps each time.
At the point of authorisation the customer sets clear parameters – for example allowing a particular merchant to collect up to £10 per transaction and no more than £150 in a month. As long as payments remain within those limits, they can be initiated directly from the retailer’s app.
A regular purchase such as ordering a coffee can then become a single interaction inside the merchant’s app rather than a full payment journey each time. The authorisation remains visible and revocable within the customer’s banking environment (triggered via the merchant's customer-facing app if desired), but the day-to-day experience feels much closer to a native in-app payment.
For merchants, this also avoids the card-on-file model that typically sits behind subscription and repeat purchase flows, along with hefty card processing costs that come with it.
Confirmation
Once authentication happens inside the banking app, the customer’s attention returns to the merchant environment.
That transition needs to feel final. Customers should immediately understand that the payment has been authorised and recorded.
Clear confirmation messaging and an obvious completion point help reinforce that understanding. Customers are used to the clarity of card payments where the terminal signals approval instantly.
Pay by Bank journeys benefit from the same level of clarity.
The final screen
The final screen of a payment journey often receives the least attention.
In practice it plays a large role in shaping how the experience is remembered.
A clear confirmation message reassures the customer that everything worked exactly as expected. Delayed or ambiguous messaging introduces doubt even when the payment itself has succeeded.
Payment journeys are remembered largely by their ending.
Habit
Consumers build payment habits through repetition.
A journey that behaves the same way every time gradually becomes familiar. Familiar experiences require less thought, which encourages people to choose the same option again.
Open banking infrastructure is already operating at significant scale.³ The challenge now is not building the rails but delivering consistently good journeys on top of them.
Merchants and platforms that treat the payment flow as something to design and refine tend to see stronger repeat usage.
¹ UK open banking adoption now exceeds 16 million users, with billions of API calls processed each month across the ecosystem. [Link](https://www.fca.org.uk/news/news-stories/open-banking-2025-progress)
² Open Banking standards support app-to-app redirection from a merchant or third-party app directly into the customer’s banking app for authentication and authorisation. [Link](https://standards.openbanking.org.uk/customer-experience-guidelines/appendices/deep-linking-for-app-to-app-redirection/latest/)
³ Open banking usage continues to grow rapidly, with tens of millions of payments and billions of API interactions occurring each month in the UK ecosystem. [Link](https://www.openbanking.org.uk/news/open-banking-surges-to-15-million-uk-users-as-july-marks-record-adoption/)
