Lloyds Bank is teaming up with Mastercard to launch PayFrom Bank, a solution that gives people the power to make direct payments to merchants from their bank accounts.
Mastercard’s open banking merchant solution offers freedom of choice to both sellers and consumers when it is time to check out, Kelly Devine, divisional president of Mastercard UK and Ireland, said in a press release on Monday (July 26).
“Merchants can now provide their customers with a wider range of payment methods without needing to store payer account details. It also removes friction for consumers as all payer details are automatically populated, meaning there’s no risk of entering the wrong account details,” Devine said.
Lloyds Bank’s PayFrom Bank tool is enabled by Mastercard’s open banking merchant payment solution and enables shoppers to sidestep entering payment data or passwords. Funds are directly deducted from a customer’s financial institution and the tool works with most retail bank accounts.
For merchants, PayFrom Bank is a cost-effective payment method that offers immediate settlement to help support working capital.
Aside from helping consumers and merchants move money, the partnership between Lloyds and Mastercard is also intended to advance open banking account-to-account (A2A) payments into the mainstream.
“PayFrom Bank combines Mastercard’s payment gateway capabilities and its open banking connect platform — a universal connection to financial institutions’ open banking functionality — to deliver a merchant A2A payment solution that covers around 95 percent of U.K. bank accounts leveraging open banking APIs,” according to the release.
The PayFrom Bank solution has sparked enthusiasm from nonprofits seeking digital donations as well as from wallet funding uses, such as investment accounts. The tool, however, can be used in any situation that requires payments.
Lloyds Banking Group is using Mastercard’s open banking merchant payment tool as a white-label solution and can be seamlessly integrated and tapped from most U.K. financial institutions using Open Banking Connect.
Brands across Lloyds Banking Group — including Halifax and the Bank of Scotland — teamed with Mastercard’s open banking connect in February.