Open Banking in 2026: How SSV SmartPay Is Bringing Pay by Bank to UK Merchants

What Open Banking Actually Is, in Plain English

Open banking is a UK regulatory framework, introduced in January 2018, that gives people and businesses the right to securely share their bank data, or initiate payments directly from their bank account, through FCA-regulated third parties, using each bank’s own secure connections (APIs).⁽¹⁾ Before open banking, your bank was a walled garden: your money and your data sat inside it, and moving either meant cards, cheques, or manual transfers. Open banking opened a regulated, consented door.

The principle is simple, and it matters: you stay in control the entire time. Your bank login details are never handed to the third party. Instead, you approve each connection or payment inside your own banking app, using the same biometric ID you already trust, and you can withdraw consent whenever you like. The technology does the heavy lifting; the permission always sits with you.

That distinction is worth holding onto, because the two terms get used interchangeably. Open banking is the regulated plumbing and the secure technology underneath. Pay by Bank is the everyday experience built on top of it: an account-to-account payment that moves money directly from one bank account to another, with no card network sitting in the middle taking a cut.

Open Banking Has Hit Its Tipping Point

Open banking is no longer an experiment. Since launching in January 2018 it has crossed from “early adopters” into “early majority”, the same shift contactless cards made around 2015, and the growth curve is now compounding. Open Banking Limited’s own data shows the UK reaching more than 18 million active open banking users by April 2026, close to double the figure of two years earlier, when it stood under 10 million.⁽²⁾

The pattern matters more than any single statistic. Contactless payments needed almost a decade of product development, and millions of daily tap-ins on the London transport network, before they became part of everyday life. Open banking has had less time than that, yet it is already changing how UK businesses get paid. The behaviour has been normalised, the technology is mature, and the regulatory momentum behind it is accelerating.

How SSV SmartPay Turns Open Banking Into Payments

Open banking is powerful, but on its own it is infrastructure, not a product a merchant can use at the end of a job. SSV SmartPay’s role is to turn that infrastructure into a payment experience that takes seconds for both sides. Using open banking payment initiation, delivered through FCA-authorised Payment Institution partners, SSV SmartPay lets any UK merchant accept Pay by Bank payments without a card reader.

Because the money moves directly between two bank accounts, several costs and risks that come bundled with card payments simply fall away. There is no card number to be skimmed or stored, which sidesteps a whole category of fraud and the PCI compliance burden that comes with handling card data. There is no chargeback mechanism the way card schemes have, because each payment is authorised at source by the payer’s own bank. And there is no card-scheme interchange, which is a large part of why SSV SmartPay can price the way it does.

Why Open Banking Matters for UK Merchants Right Now

For a UK business, the case for open banking payments is not abstract: it shows up in cash flow, in costs, and in the customer experience. Here is what changes when a merchant gets paid through Pay by Bank instead of a traditional card machine.

There is also a timing argument that is easy to overlook. The merchants adopting open banking payments now are doing what early contactless merchants did a decade ago: normalising a behaviour just ahead of the curve. As the UK’s National Payments Vision pushes account-to-account payments toward the mainstream, being set up for Pay by Bank early is less a gamble and more a head start.

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