Every checkout now offers one more button. Pay by bank, account to account, A2A, whatever the app decides to call it. Most people tap the card option out of habit and never think about it again. That habit deserves a second look, because the two routes behave very differently once money starts moving.
The money takes a different road
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Card payments travel through Visa or Mastercard before landing with the merchant. A2A skips that trip and pushes funds straight from one bank account into another. The cost gap is not subtle either: FedNow charges somewhere around four cents per transaction, while card processing averages about 3.5 percent of the sale. Merchants did the maths quickly.
Withdrawal speed turned into a product feature somewhere along the way. Comparison pages ranking fast payout betting sites exist because users started treating waiting time as something worth shopping around for, and bank rails are what make same-day money realistic. Cards were built to handle money coming in. Sending it back out was always the slow half.
Visa bought Tink. Mastercard bought Aiia. Neither company acquires open banking infrastructure by accident.
What users actually feel
HMRC began accepting pay by bank in 2021 and has collected more than £33 billion through it since, or around £2.3 billion in a single recent year, depending which report you trust. Tax bills drove mainstream adoption in Britain. Not shopping, not takeaways. Tax bills.
Inside an app, three things change in ways an ordinary user notices:
- Card details never get typed, stored or exposed, because nothing leaves the bank login screen
- Refunds land in seconds instead of crawling through the usual three to five working days
- Authentication happens inside the banking app that most people already have open on the same phone
Refund speed is the one that converts sceptics. Anyone who has waited a week for a returned pair of trainers to show up in their balance understands the appeal immediately.
The protection gap nobody mentions at checkout
Consumer group Which? surveyed over 2,500 UK adults and found that only 13 percent knew they would have no clear purchase protection if they booked a flight with pay by bank and the airline went under. One in eight. That single number explains most of the nervousness around this payment method.
Card users get Section 75 on credit purchases above £100, plus chargeback on debit and credit spending of any size. A2A offers neither. Strip away the polished interface and it remains a bank transfer, which means the money is gone the moment it arrives.
So use it deliberately. Utility bills, tax, credit card balances, topping up a wallet you control: perfectly sensible, since the counterparty is not about to vanish. A £900 sofa from a retailer nobody has heard of: reach for the card and accept the fee.
Why adoption is still slower than the headlines suggest
Just 6 percent of UK e-commerce transactions went through A2A in 2025. For a technology this heavily promoted, that figure is almost funny. Britain has a real problem selling the idea, and none of it is technical:
- Contactless already works beautifully. It arrived in 2007 and became the country’s most popular payment method by 2018, so there is no friction left for anyone to fix.
- Nothing mandates it. India built UPI and Brazil built Pix as state-backed rails aimed at people without card access, which gave both an obvious reason to exist.
- Shoppers gain nothing directly. Merchants pocket the saved fees, and the person tapping the button gets a warm feeling and slightly faster refunds.
Contrast that with Spain, where Bizum turned bank transfers into the default way friends split a dinner bill, and the ecommerce use case followed almost by itself. Habit came first. The technology just had somewhere to go.
Amazon and eBay have both added the option in the UK, which will teach a great many people that the button exists. Whether they press it a second time depends entirely on what happens the first time something goes wrong.