SHARE

December 10, 2021

Introducing Payouts in the UK - enabling your users to instantly make withdrawals and refunds

Sanjna Verma

Last year, we launched Payment Initiation in the UK, enabling users to make instant bank payments within your app. As a result, customers like Kraken, MoneyBox, and PensionBee are able to offer a smooth “click, confirm, and carry on” experience using Plaid’s open banking platform.

We’ve seen payments made using open banking providers skyrocket from 640,000 payments in October 2020, to 2.85 million in October 2021. According to Statista, open banking users are expected to grow at a rate of 50%, with the majority of that growth occurring in the European market. 

Introducing Payouts

One of the main questions we’ve heard from customers is whether Payment Initiation supports withdrawals and refunds. To help continue to drive adoption for open banking payments and make it a full stack payment solution, today we’re excited to announce a new product: Payouts.

Payouts enables users to seamlessly and instantly make withdrawals and refunds from the app or service that they are using. This is accomplished by opening and pre-funding an e-money account, from which funds can be sent to users requesting a payout. Today, Plaid partners with Railsr1, an authorised e-money institution, for the provision of e-money accounts to facilitate Payouts. 

Payouts are:

  • Instant: Running on UK Faster Payments rails, users see Payouts arrive in their accounts right away.

  • Easy to integrate: Integrate Payment Initiation and Payouts with one API to save time and avoid manual mistakes. 

  • Verified: With Payouts and Auth, users’ bank details are auto-populated to ensure you are making a payout to a valid account.

  • Low cost: Cut hefty costs from cards and acquirers with low fixed-fee payments.

Payment Confirmation

In addition to launching Payouts, we’re rolling out a feature for Payment Initiation–Payment Confirmation. Payment Confirmation notifies you when payments are received in your merchant account so you can ship goods and services with peace of mind.

Get started with Payouts and Payment Initiation

Payouts and Payment Confirmation are available today. This new product and feature will help drive open banking payment adoption across many more use cases including e-commerce, iGaming, and more, allowing users to seamlessly pay-in and pay-out all using the same integration.

If you’re new to Plaid, please contact our Sales team to get access today. If you’re an existing customer, please reach out to your Growth Account Manager.

Contact sales

1  Railsr, also known as PayrNet Limited, is authorised by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in the UK. FRN: 90059