Open banking needs its own brand identity to earn users’ trust

Previously published on FintechBoostUp.com

Pay-by-Bank. Pay by bank account. Account-to-account payments. A2A. Open banking. Instant payments…

All of these terms are currently being used to refer to the same, simple method of a payment made from one bank account to another – a payment initiated through open banking providers, meaning consumers are saved the hassle of diligently typing in, checking and verifying the transfer details.

It is a mechanism that is widely expected to grow into a primary means of payment worldwide. In December last year, the UK saw 12 million users of open banking, according to openbanking.org.uk. But it is a payment method that still lacks a name and a proper identity – a brand, if you will. Think of Direct Debit, think of Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) – these are mechanisms that consumers are familiar with. They are trusted and, importantly, they are used.

At the moment, momentum appears to be with ‘Pay by Bank’ – this seems to be the term most commonly used – but even still, user understanding is limited.

This month, we published the inaugural Yaspa Index – a survey to track consumer familiarity with the names associated with this payment method and it found that only 45% of the 2,000 UK adults surveyed were familiar with ‘Pay by Bank’. Clearly there is work to do.

Brand-building and earning trust

Few consumers are likely to choose a payment method they don’t understand, especially if the alternatives – such as cards and wallets – are familiar.

At Yaspa, we focus on that conversion process for our payments and what happens when we work with a merchant or an operator.

When we put that Yaspa button on their platform – alongside a bunch of other different payment options, which might be debit cards or might be buy-now-pay-later buttons or wallets – what is the user experience and what does the data tell us?

As we all know, there’s a plethora of options that can be present at a checkout or within a payment page. In the absence of any adopted conventions, how we design the button and the iconography we deploy is driven by our reactive UX, with interactive changes based on user behaviour and data such as conversion rates.  

Our competitors have different approaches to us. And as the brand owner within Yaspa, I really want to make sure that our brand comes through, but more fundamentally, I want to make sure that users who want to choose this method of paying know what it is that they’re clicking on.

It’s an evolving discussion. Even within the industry, we are calling it “pay-by-bank account”, “account to account payments”, “open banking payments”. At Yaspa, we call it “instant bank payments”, but there’s a whole range of names that are being used.

What’s crucial here is that it’s not only the name, but also the visual elements, as recognition is key. When a customer comes across it repeatedly they should immediately recognise what’s going on and be comfortable with the process. We need to agree on a unified term, along with a strong brand and logo.

Educating and informing

How is Pay by Bank different from a bank transfer using faster payments? We know that it’s different because you’re using the open banking protocol and that it’s being initiated by the merchant, rather than being initiated by the customer, but that’s not necessarily obvious to the customer.

So is there a general familiarity with faster payments and bank transfers? Absolutely. Do people understand how something running over the open banking rails works, mostly probably not but I don’t think that matters. I don’t think users necessarily need to know how it works, but they should know a) the benefit to them of using it (for example, speed, security, control, fewer input errors) and b) when they’ve used it in one place, recognising it’s available as an option in another place, even if it’s from a different provider.

There’s work to do to improve from a PR and marketing perspective on how we adopt a term holistically and not just in the UK but other countries around the world. In other nations, they’ve got their own schemes doing the same thing and some of them have been more successful than others. For example, if we take a look at Pix, in South America, maybe we can learn from some of the things they’re doing. Accessibility, ease of use, government-backed support and strong branding have seen Pix become Brazil’s most widely used digital payment method.

A collective effort

It is super exciting to be in a new emerging method or technology or an aspect of payment that pretty confidently we can say is going to see global adoption, but it’s still very much at the beginning.

It reminds me of those very, very early days of the internet when you knew something exciting was happening. Everybody was playing around with it and coming up with innovative approaches, but no one was quite sure exactly how it was going to take off.

I’m fascinated to see how this is going to play out and what we as different members of the industry in different capacities can do to improve adoption.

Download the 2025 Yaspa Index to unlock more insights and analysis from this year’s report.