Open banking is no longer just a trend; it is a movement reaching a tipping point. In the UK alone, over 33 million successful payments are made monthly, and 1 in 3 consumers use Pay by Bank regularly.
But for PSPs, Pay by Bank is just the tip of the iceberg.
Competing on transaction fees alone creates a single point of failure for your business’s differentiation. Expanding your value proposition beyond the checkout to the entire merchant lifecycle can help you develop an economic moat, allowing you to maintain market share and profitability over the long term.
By combining payments with the data available through open banking, you can power the operational engine of your merchants’ businesses, solving multiple friction points for merchants that drive tangible outcomes like:
Help customers win more customers and grow your topline
Reduce abandonment and accelerate time to value
Increase customer stickiness and improve NPS
Make future-readiness your competitive edge
The Growth Flywheel: Building a competitive edge layer upon layer
Sustainable differentiation requires a strategy that compounds value. That’s why we’ve created the Growth Flywheel, which links acquisition, monetisation, and retention into one compounding commercial model.
This model guides merchants through a continuous cycle, layering open banking-powered services at every step. By optimising these touchpoints, you create a resilient value proposition that goes far beyond the checkout.
1. Win new customers and grow your top line
As the foundation of open banking, Pay by Bank plays a significant part in driving strategic value for merchants. It offers lower fees and higher conversion than cards, as well as reduced chargebacks and better security with built-in SCA.
As Pay by Bank adoption grows, it will develop into the foundation for more advanced use cases. In the UK, the next major step is already taking shape: Commercial Variable Recurring Payments (cVRP). This will bring Pay by Bank into mainstream e-commerce use cases.
Win the subscription economy
Best for: D2C, utilities, e-commerce subscriptions, gyms
The global subscription economy is projected to reach $1.2tn by 2030, so now is the time to optimise your payment stack to capture this volume. However, merchants that operate subscription models face two structural issues: card failure rates and delayed settlement under Direct Debit. cVRP can address both.
Reduced involuntary churn: Unlike cards, bank account details don't expire, securing long-term customer lifetime value.
Instant settlement: Funds settle instantly, eliminating the 3-day cash flow gap inherent to Direct Debit.
Frictionless experience: Enables variable payments within pre-agreed parameters, removing the need for repeated manual authentication.
Build a one-click checkout
Best for: e-commerce, grocery, gaming
For merchants supporting high-frequency payments, friction is the enemy of conversion. cVRP enables a secure “bank-on-file" experience that rivals wallet and card-on-file methods.
Higher conversion: After initial SCA, repeat purchases require no further authentication, reducing checkout abandonment.
Reduced operational overhead: Built-in SCA and lower chargeback risk decrease operational costs compared to traditional card-on-file.
Lower payment failures: Removes the need to manually update details when cards expire or are stolen.
cVRP vs. Direct Debit vs. Card-on-file
Feature | cVRP | Direct Debit | Card-on-File |
Setup authentication | Strong SCA once | Paper/online form | Card details entry |
User-defined limits |
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Instant cancellation |
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Settlement speed |
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(2+ hrs - 2 days) |
Fraud protection |
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Failure rate |
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Chargeback risk |
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Why act now?
The first cVRP transactions will go live by the end of Q1 2026, with wider e-commerce use cases expected by the end of the year. The race to secure a first-mover advantage is already in motion.
The Yapily advantage
The rollout of cVRP requires reliability and scale. Over the past 12 months, Yapily has processed 47.2 million payments and 721 million API calls, meaning we have the infrastructure needed to handle the traffic demands for cVRP. As part of the founding VRP Working Group which set the standards for cVRP, we support early-scale deployments.
Learn about cVRP and how to join the Yapily cVRP pilot
2. Reduce onboarding abandonment and accelerate time-to-value
36% of small to medium merchants say a simple application process is vital when selecting a payments provider. This means that automating part of the Know Your Business (KYB) process will give you an advantage over competitors.
Merchants that verify business identity and account ownership manually often rely on document uploads and manual cross-referencing, which leads to:
Manual errors in data entry that increase costs and decrease customer satisfaction
High overheads for cross-referencing data that increase the cost of acquisition
Customer abandonment due to the disjointed, clunky, complicated process
Every merchant abandoning the flow or activating with delays means lost revenue and negative NPS.
Optimise merchant onboarding with open banking data
Open banking supports the automation of business identity and account ownership checks using real-time data access. This small tweak can be enough of an edge over competitors to attract new business while also driving your topline:
Reduced costs: Less human error means lower overheads on staff and resources.
Shorter time to value: Merchants can start processing payments faster, meaning they (and you) see revenue sooner.
Higher conversion: Reducing reliance on manual uploads reduces abandonment and improves overall NPS.
Strong B2B coverage is the key
Merchant onboarding requires reliable open banking data connectivity to business accounts. While many open banking platforms provide limited business bank account coverage, Yapily has wide coverage across the UK and Europe for both business and consumer accounts.
Leaders like Adyen and Google are already using our data services to power their onboarding in major European markets.
3. Increase customer stickiness and improve NPS
Driving long-term revenue relies on retention and expanding merchant lifecycle value. Open banking data can give you that edge. Developing value-added services built on high-quality, real-time data means you can:
Increase stickiness: Embed value-added services directly into your merchants’ operations, increasing barriers to switching and reducing churn.
Unlock diversified revenue: Grow your margins by layering fees for value-added services.
Drive NPS: Provide the levers merchants need to grow, building trust and increasing merchant satisfaction.
Unlocking value-added services that drive stickiness
Making this shift towards “sticky” services doesn’t need to upend your product roadmap. Open banking data is highly flexible and can be applied across multiple use cases, enabling you to build targeted services that address specific merchant needs.
Examples include:
Merchant cash flow forecasting: Give merchants data-backed insights they need to make strategic decisions.
Merchant credit decisioning: Offer personalised credit when merchants need to scale or expand.
Onboarding-as-a-Service: Resell onboarding to create new B2B revenue streams.
Merchant demand drives your roadmap, but open banking data gives you the freedom and flexibility to build value-added services that meet their specific needs.
Enriched open banking data: The key to unlocking truly valuable services
Regular open banking data supports merchant onboarding, but enriching that data converts it into structured signals, enabling advanced analytics, credit decisioning, and merchant insights. This can give your services the edge they need to stay sticky and even attract new merchants.
Yapily's transaction data enrichment and categorisation product is called Data Plus. Data Plus uses machine learning models trained on billions of transactions to convert raw bank data into structured, usable signals.
Data Plus: Transforming data into valuable building blocks
Feature | Insight delivered |
Categorisation | Automated, high-accuracy transaction tagging. |
Merchant data | Clean, ready-to-analyse names. |
Recurrence | Identifies subscriptions vs. one-offs and next payment dates. |
Intermediaries | Flags payment processors and intermediaries. |
Combined with strong B2B coverage, enriched data expands use cases beyond basic B2C payment initiation.
4. Make future-readiness your competitive edge
You may already be positioned as a long-term partner, but if you can’t demonstrate a credible vision of what’s next, you’re already at a disadvantage.
Payment services are shifting toward programmable consent, embedded finance, and automated decisioning. Platforms that already combine payment initiation and real-time data can adapt to these shifts without major architectural changes.
Preparing for the introduction of agentic commerce
Agentic commerce will enable AI systems to initiate purchases within predefined spending limits and consent parameters. While it’s not yet live, research by McKinsey projects that the retail market could see $3 trillion to $5 trillion of revenue moved globally by Agentic AI.
Open banking provides essential components for the enablement of agent-led payments:
cVRP enables programmable spending limits and instant mandate control.
Open banking data provides real-time account visibility to inform automated decisions.
Encrypted APIs ensure secure execution of transactions.
Yapily participates in industry initiatives shaping programmable payment standards, including Google’s Agent Payments Protocol (AP2) initiative.
Get ready for the Open Finance revolution
Open Finance will extend data-sharing beyond payments into additional financial products, expanding the scope of programmable financial services.
PSPs that already integrate open banking payments and data will be best positioned to expand into these services without rebuilding their infrastructure. This will reduce future integration costs and accelerate time to market as new data categories become available.
As an infrastructure provider, Yapily enables PSPs to build and control merchant-facing services while enabling bank connectivity. Additionally, we provide regulated open-banking infrastructure that supports compliance processes implemented by PSPs. This will allow them to expand under Open Finance without direct-to-merchant conflict.
Build a competitive edge that lasts
In a market where payment processing is increasingly commoditised, competing on transaction fees alone means your competitive advantage is fragile.
By following our Growth Flywheel model, you can use open banking to shift your focus from checkout optimisation to the full merchant lifecycle, creating deeper integration and more durable revenue streams. This creates the "stickiness" that protects and grows your margins. Merchants may switch processors for cost savings, but they rarely switch deeply embedded partners.
Why PSPs choose Yapily as their strategic infrastructure partner:
Broad European connectivity (B2B & B2C): Our extensive coverage across UK and European banks supports connectivity to B2C and B2B bank accounts, supporting both consumer payments and merchant services.
Single integration: Access payments and data through one integration, enabling onboarding automation, cVRP, and new services without fragmenting your roadmap.
Total brand control: White-label and hosted options give you the flexibility to retain full ownership of the merchant relationship.
Enterprise-grade infrastructure: Resilient and reliable infrastructure built to handle bank connectivity complexity and traffic spikes with 99.9%+ uptime.
Benchmark your open banking strategy
Does your roadmap treat payments and data as a single intelligence layer, or are you running them as separate entities?
Book a call to assess how combining open banking payments and data can improve your competitive edge and drive revenue growth throughout the merchant lifecycle.