Pay by Bank

Accept payments directly from your customers' bank accounts using Open Banking.

Pay by Bank allows your customers to make payments directly from their bank account using Open Banking technology. It supports two payment types:

Single Immediate Payments (SIP): a single, immediate bank transfer initiated by the customer at the point of checkout.
Variable Recurring Payments (VRP): a series of payments made against a pre-authorised mandate, without requiring the customer to re-authenticate for each transaction.

Both payment types settle in real time over Faster Payments. As authenticated, direct account-to-account transfers, they do not run over card networks, so the card scheme dispute and chargeback mechanism does not apply.

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Note: Pay by Bank is only supported when using GBP as the currency. In API requests the currency field takes the lowercase value gbp.

Integration paths

Pay by Bank can be integrated in the ways below. The same options apply to both one-off payments and recurring (VRP) payments.

Integration method	Description
Hosted Checkout	Acquired hosts the payment screens (bank selection, authentication, and, for VRP, mandate setup) and redirects the customer. Fastest to build. See Pay by Bank in Hosted Checkout.
Direct API (build your own UI)	Call the Acquired API directly and build your own UI for full control of the customer journey. Start with Create a single immediate payment for one-off payments, or Create a mandate for VRP.

Components support for Pay by Bank is coming soon. Today, use Hosted Checkout or the Direct API.

Note: For recurring payments, Hosted Checkout and Components handle mandate setup only. The payments themselves are always initiated by you via the API - see Recurring Pay by Bank (VRP).

Choosing the right payment type

Attribute	One-off Pay by Bank (SIP)	Recurring Pay by Bank (VRP)
Customer authentication	Required for each payment	Required once (mandate setup only)
Amount	Fixed per transaction	Variable, within mandate limits
Funds transfer	Real-time (Faster Payments)	Real-time (Faster Payments)
Best for	E-commerce checkouts, ad-hoc invoices, one-time payments	Subscriptions, top-ups, savings contributions

Customer authentication

The authentication experience depends on the customer's device.

On mobile. The customer is redirected directly to their mobile banking app to authenticate and approve. Once complete, they are returned to your redirect URL.

On desktop. A QR code is displayed, allowing the customer to hand off authentication to their mobile device. Their banking app launches automatically on the mobile device. Once approved, the customer is directed back to your site on desktop.

This applies to both one-off payment authorisation and mandate setup for recurring payments. The authentication step only occurs once for VRP mandates — subsequent payments collected against the mandate require no customer interaction.

Closed-loop Open Banking settlement

Your Pay by Bank funds will be settled into an Acquired ledger. With closed-loop settlement, payments collected via Pay by Bank settle directly into your Acquired settlement account.

This means:

Faster reconciliation. Payments move from executed to settled within the Acquired platform, giving you a single source of truth for transaction status.
Reduced operational overhead. There is no need to match incoming bank transfers against payment records across separate systems.
Instant refund and payout capabilities. With funds held in your Acquired ledger, you can issue refunds and payouts instantly without waiting for external bank processing.

Funds held in your Acquired-managed account are batch settled to your external bank account each working day.

Next steps

One-off Pay by Bank (SIP) — take a single immediate bank transfer.
Recurring Pay by Bank (VRP) — set up a VRP mandate and collect against it.
Supported Banks — which banks support one-off, Sweeping VRP and Commercial VRP.
Statuses — every status a payment or mandate can return.
Webhook Notifications — the events Acquired sends you, with example payloads.
Cancel a Mandate — the hosted revocation flow.