-- Open banking spent its first decade being explained rather than used. Regulators built the frameworks, aggregators built the budgeting apps, and merchants were told repeatedly that bank-to-bank payments would eventually take a serious share of commerce.
That eventually is now arriving, and it is arriving for distinctly practical reasons: settlement speed, processing cost, and whether the finance team can work out where the money came from – and where it lands once it does.
From regulatory project to payment rail
The first wave was shaped by PSD2 in Europe and the Open Banking mandate in the UK. Both created the legal mechanism for licensed third parties to access account data and initiate payments with the customer's authorisation. What they did not create was a reason for a merchant to switch.
The reason came later, from the real-time rails. Faster Payments in the UK and SEPA Instant across the eurozone made it possible for a bank payment to clear in seconds rather than days. That single change turned open banking from a compliance artefact into something with a commercial argument behind it.
For a merchant, seconds versus days is not a convenience question. It determines when funds are usable, how quickly a reconciliation cycle closes, and how much working capital sits in transit at any given moment. At high volume, those are cash flow numbers, not operational preferences.
Why merchants started looking
Cards are not going anywhere, and nobody serious in payments argues otherwise. But merchants have become considerably more precise about what card acceptance costs them once interchange, scheme fees, disputes, chargebacks, and settlement timing are added together.
Pay-by-bank moves money directly through banking infrastructure, which removes several of those layers. For e-commerce and other high-volume businesses, the appeal is rarely about replacing cards outright. It is about having a second rail, and being able to route a transaction according to its type, its geography, and what the customer would actually prefer to use.
The problem nobody solved for a decade
A merchant collecting open banking payments receives them as ordinary inbound transfers. At low volumes, this is manageable. However, at scale, manual payment matching increases headcount and reduces the cost advantage over cards.
"The industry spent years treating this as an adoption problem," said Serhii Zakharov, CEO and founder of PayDo. "It was never that. The payments arrived in a form no finance team could use without doing extra work, and they arrived with a certainty no business could rely on. Fix how the money arrives and the adoption question mostly answers itself."
The second half of that is the part merchants feel most sharply. Most gateways confirm a payment at the point of initiation, when the customer authorises it in their banking app. The merchant then delivers against funds that have not yet settled, effectively financing the gap themselves on every transaction.
What PayDo built
PayDo's response was to treat both problems as account-structure problems rather than reporting problems.
The company built a dedicated IBAN designed specifically to receive consumer-to-business open banking payments, rather than repurposing a general business account. Because the account exists for that single purpose, incoming payments are identified as they land. Nothing needs to be disambiguated afterwards. Settlement runs through Faster Payments, and the merchant is notified when funds are genuinely present rather than when a gateway believes they are coming.
Euro flows got the same treatment through direct SEPA and SEPA Instant connectivity, removing the correspondent banks that had been quietly reinserting delay and cost into cross-border collections.
On top of that sits a collections account built for merchants running real volume, currently capable of supporting more than 100,000 transactions a day, with reconciliation and tracking built into the account rather than reconstructed from it afterwards.
Where the money actually lands: the multi-currency account layer
Fast settlement solves half the problem. The other half is what happens to the funds once they arrive – and for any business collecting open banking payments across more than one market, that means having somewhere to hold sterling, euros, and other currencies without converting everything back to a single base currency on arrival.
This is the role PayDo's multi-currency account plays inside the wider setup. Rather than forcing every open banking payment through an immediate FX conversion, a multi-currency business account lets a merchant hold balances in the currency they were paid in, convert on their own schedule, and pay out suppliers or team members in that same currency where it makes sense to. For a business collecting GBP through Faster Payments and EUR through SEPA Instant in parallel, a multicurrency bank account is less a convenience feature than the thing that makes the two rails usable side by side without a conversion cost on every single transaction.
It is also, practically speaking, what turns a fast payment into a usable one. A multi-currency bank account that reconciles automatically against incoming open banking collections means a finance team isn't just receiving money quickly – they're receiving it somewhere already organised by currency, already matched to the transaction that generated it, and ready to move again without a manual FX step in between.
Consolidation is the other half of the story
Open banking is maturing at the same time as a second shift in payments, which is the collapse of fragmented provider stacks.
An internationally trading business has historically needed separate relationships for card acquiring, bank transfers, SEPA payments, international transfers, and multi-currency bank account to hold it all in. Each carries its own integration, its own compliance process, its own reconciliation file and its own point of failure.
PayDo's open banking capability sits inside the same platform as its multi-currency account, card acquiring and cross-border transfers, under one contract and one integration. A client already holding a multi-currency business account with PayDo can switch on open banking collections without a separate onboarding process or a new provider relationship.
This matters more than it sounds. Sub-second settlement offers little value if funds still require manual reconciliation. Instead, speed becomes an advantage when reconciliation, currency handling, and reporting happen within one multi-currency business account.
What comes next
The trajectory of open banking payments is tied to the expansion of instant payment networks. Faster Payments and SEPA Instant are established; other markets are building or extending comparable systems, and greater interoperability between banks, providers and real-time networks will strengthen the commercial case further.
Fraud prevention, dispute handling and regulatory consistency remain genuinely unresolved as volumes climb, and the industry should be honest about that rather than treating it as a footnote.
But the central question has changed. It is no longer whether bank-initiated payments work technically. That was settled years ago. It is whether the infrastructure around them – including where the money actually sits once it lands – performs reliably enough for a merchant to rely on it as a primary collection channel rather than an experiment running alongside cards.
About PayDo
PayDo is a unified payment ecosystem providing payment and account solutions for businesses and individuals. Its infrastructure supports multiple payment methods and financial operations, including a multi-currency account, open banking collections, card acquiring, and cross-border transfers designed to help businesses manage collections and payments across markets.
Contact Info:
Name: PayDo
Email: Send Email
Organization: PayDo
Website: https://paydo.com/
Release ID: 89201549
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