Pay by Bank is growing fast. With over 36 million transactions per month and household names like Amazon, eBay, Ryanair and JustEat now offering it at checkout, it's clear that merchants see the value. But what about the people actually making the payments?

The advantages for businesses adopting Pay by Bank as a payment method are clear: lower costs, faster settlement, reduced fraud. But the consumer story is just as compelling. It's the one that matters most. Because ultimately, consumer adoption is what will determine whether Pay by Bank fulfils its potential as a genuine alternative to cards.

So here are five reasons why Pay by Bank is not just different from cards, it's better for the people using it:

1. Instant refunds: your money back in seconds, not days

Refunds matter more than most businesses realise. In research conducted by TrueLayer, 84% of online shoppers said they expect a refund within a week at most, and 80% said the speed of a refund affects whether they shop with a brand again. That's a direct link between refund experience and customer loyalty.

With card payments, refunds can take anywhere from three to five working days to land back in your account. That's because the money has to travel back through the same chain of intermediaries it came through in the first place: merchant, acquirer, card scheme, issuing bank.

Pay by Bank cuts through this. Because the payment was made directly from the consumer's bank account, the refund can go straight back the same way instantly. Providers like TrueLayer have built payout infrastructure that enables merchants to send refunds that settle in seconds, not days. No waiting, no uncertainty, no checking your account every morning wondering where your money is. You get it back, and you can spend it again immediately.

2. No card expiry: payments that just work

Here's a scenario most people will recognise: you get a new debit or credit card, and over the following weeks, a string of subscriptions and recurring payments start failing. Your gym membership bounces. Your streaming service sends a passive-aggressive email. A utility bill goes unpaid and a late fee quietly accumulates.

Expired cards are one of the biggest — and least talked about — sources of failed payments. Visa cards in payment vaults have an average lifespan of around 21 months. For Mastercard, it's just 14 months. Every time a card expires, is lost, or is reissued after a fraud incident, every merchant holding those card details on file is affected. For subscription businesses, this kind of involuntary churn can account for up to 40% of lost subscribers.

Pay by Bank eliminates this problem entirely. Because it connects directly to your bank account, rather than a 16-digit number printed on a piece of plastic, there's nothing to expire, nothing to update, and nothing to go wrong when your bank sends you a replacement card. Your bank account doesn't expire. Your payments just keep working.

For consumers, that means fewer missed payments, fewer late fees, and fewer of those awkward moments when your card is declined at the worst possible time.

3. Safety: every single payment is authenticated

Card fraud in the UK is at record levels. In the first half of 2025 alone, there were 1.94 million cases of unauthorised card fraud — the highest ever recorded for a six-month period — with losses totalling £299 million. That is more than half a billion pounds per year. Remote purchase fraud, where stolen card details are used to buy things online, accounted for the majority, with cases rising 22% year-on-year.

The fundamental problem is architectural. When you pay with a card online, you share your card number, expiry date and security code. That information is, by design, reusable. If it's intercepted, leaked in a data breach, or harvested by a malicious actor, it can be used again and again to make unauthorised purchases.

Pay by Bank works differently. Every single payment is authenticated in your own banking app, using biometric security (such as your fingerprint or face recognition). No details are shared in the checkout. No reusable credentials leave your device. The payment instruction goes directly from your bank, who sends money to the merchant, with nothing in between that could be stolen or reused.

4. Resilience: a genuine alternative when cards go down

Payment outages are no longer rare. Research by FreedomPay and Retail Economics found that the average UK business now experiences more than five major payment system outages per year, with 61% occurring during peak trading periods. The financial cost is staggering: £1.6 billion in annual sales are estimated to be at risk across UK retail, hospitality and leisure.

And consumers have very little patience. The same research found that most shoppers will tolerate just six minutes of disruption before becoming frustrated, and will abandon a purchase entirely after 22 minutes. The average outage, however, lasts 84 minutes.

And with Visa and Mastercard accounting for 84% of all UK retail payments, a single point of failure in the card network can shut down commerce for millions of people.

Pay by Bank provides that resilience. It runs on entirely separate infrastructure — open banking APIs — meaning it's unaffected by card scheme outages. When Crowdstrike took card payments offline in July 2024, merchants with Pay by Bank enabled at checkout could still accept payments. Having an additional payment method isn't just a nice-to-have; it's an insurance policy for the consumers and merchants who depend on them.

Governments increasingly recognise this. The UK’s National Payments Vision explicitly identifies the development of account to account payments as crucial to ensuring the UK's payment ecosystem is resilient and competitive.

5. Budgeting certainty: see your balance before you spend

When it comes to knowing what you’re spending, there are a couple of key differences between spending by card and Paying by Bank. When you checkout with a card, you don’t see your bank balance in the transaction flow. To make things worse, the money doesn't leave your account immediately. It sits in a pending state — sometimes for days — creating a gap between what you think your balance is and what it actually is. For anyone trying to manage a budget or avoid an overdraft, this opacity is a real problem.

Pay by Bank flips this. First, because the bank screen you are taken to to authenticate each Pay by bank payment, also includes your balance, you get visibility, while making the purchase. If you know a purchase will take you into an overdraft you can’t afford, you have a chance to step back.

Second, because the payment is initiated and settled from your bank account in real time, you have immediate transparency after a purchase about how much you have left to spend on other things. There's no ambiguity, no "pending" transactions clouding the picture, and no unpleasant surprises at the end of the month.

This certainty is especially valuable for the millions of people managing tight household budgets. The FCA's own research found that 7.4 million UK consumers feel burdened by bills and credit commitments, and 5.5 million have missed payments in the last six months.

A better way to pay

These five benefits — instant refunds, no card expiry, stronger security, greater resilience, and budgeting certainty — aren't marginal improvements. They represent a fundamentally better payment experience for consumers.

And the market is responding. Pay by bank in the UK grew 53% year-on-year in 2025, with more than 16 million users now benefiting from the service.

The task now is to ensure every consumer can access these benefits online, in-app and eventually at the point of sale. That means continuing to invest in infrastructure, expanding functionality like variable recurring payments, and ensuring the regulatory framework keeps pace with innovation.

Because when it comes to paying for things, consumers deserve a choice beyond the status quo.