GoCardless has recently released Instant Bank Pay, its first major step in driving the trend of open banking. With Instant Bank Pay, merchants will have access to more economical and efficient ways to take instant payments from new and existing customers through a single platform.
Since open banking’s beginnings several years ago, its existence and benefits have remained opaque to many consumers around the world. Open banking technology offers a whole host of innovation that will streamline banking and save its users burdensome fees and effort. Since open banking allows banks access and control of customers’ personal financial data to facilitate the ease of integration with useful financial services, customers are required to provide consent - which they may be hesitant to do. However, the API-driven technology allows customers to more securely share their data with institutions to help them save time when switching to new financial products, applying for financial services, or aggregating financial information across applications.
Despite the benefits, adoption has been slow until relatively recently. Companies like GoCardless, a fintech platform that focuses on bank-to-bank payments, are spearheading the trend in order to champion their products. For instance, Instant Bank Pay will enable merchants to take one-time bank-to-bank payments alongside subscription payments with ease. This service will help merchants overcome the complexities of arranging anomaly payments such as start-fees to subscription services while overriding manual processing as well as high fees. With the bank-to-bank instant payments, cards can be substituted, offering more security to users while bypassing expensive card processing fees.
With offerings such as Instant Bank Pay being made available to GoCardless’ some 60,000 merchants at low cost and high convenience, soon more and more Americans will be exposed to and won over by open banking. Speaking on this, Hiroki Takeuchi, CEO of GoCardless said, “By enabling businesses to take any kind of payment through GoCardless, we can challenge the dominance of cards and move beyond collecting subscriptions, invoices and installments. The launch of this open banking feature means we can now serve any merchant, regardless of whether they have an ongoing or one-off relationship with their customers.”
API-based open banking offers a whole new realm of possibility in the banking space, one that will offer greater ease of migration, adoption of new services, benefits in fees, and transparency with banks. Hopefully, GoCardless’s step in this direction is a major catalyst for other companies to hasten the trend.
