Acquired.com Unveils Tool to Promote UK Open Banking

Acquired.com, a United Kingdom FinTech, has debuted a tool to help merchants offer open banking payments.

The payments specialist’s Hosted Checkout solution lets merchants accept credit and debit cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay and open banking payments through a single integration, according to a Monday (Sept. 4) press release.

“We believe that our Hosted Checkout solution solves a key challenge for merchants who want to deliver a variety of payment methods for their customers but are reluctant to undertake numerous time-consuming integrations,” Acquired.com Commercial Director Mark Johnson said in the release. “In particular, the ability to offer open banking payments, a payment method that is yet to see widespread use in many sectors, alongside other payment methods and without the need for a separate integration is a game changer for forward-thinking merchants.”

Industry observers argue that open banking, also known as “pay by bank,” could represent a massive upheaval in the payments sector. This method leverages application programming interfaces (APIs) to enable secure and direct communication between financial institutions and payment service providers.

The launch of Hosted Checkout comes on the heels of what appears on paper to be a “seismic shift” in open banking in the U.K., as PYMNTS wrote last week.

Figures showed transactions doubling between last year and this year, with people making 11.4 million open banking payments in July, up 9% from June. Active payment users came to 4.2 million, a 10.5% increase from June and a 68% jump from July 2022.

The World Bank estimated that 67 million people live in Great Britain, with the country’s government saying that 63% of the population is of “working age,” which is between 16 and 64, all people who could, in theory, be included to use open banking.

“The read-across for open banking elsewhere — particularly [in the United States] — is that there’s no guarantee for open banking’s success,” PYMNTS wrote. “The key … rests with solving customer pain points, where the payments themselves will be deemed ‘better than,’ say, using cards, which … are ubiquitous in this market.”

In July, Acquired.com began working with B2B payments company Mondu to offer a range of customers access to Mondu’s suite of services.