Accepting Trustly as a merchant
Trustly is an open banking payment provider: the customer authorises a payment directly from their bank account, without a card and without leaving your checkout for long. It competes with cards on cost and with local schemes on reach, and it is priced accordingly.
Set-up
How to accept Trustly as a merchant
You contract with Trustly directly or enable it through your PSP. The payment is initiated from the customer’s bank environment, so authentication is handled by the bank and the funds position is confirmed at checkout. There is no card network in the chain, which is precisely why the economics differ.
Economics
Where account-to-account earns its place
No interchange, no scheme fees and no card-style chargebacks. On high basket values that combination can make bank payment materially cheaper than cards, and in categories with elevated dispute rates the absence of chargebacks removes a loss line as well as an operational one. The trade-off is that refunds are outbound payments you initiate and disputes are settled with the customer rather than through a scheme process.
Initiation
The right this rail runs on, and the condition attached to it
Open banking acceptance is not a commercial arrangement negotiated bank by bank. It rests on a right the directive gives the customer, and knowing the exact wording changes the questions you put to a provider.
Article 66(1) of Directive (EU) 2015/2366 provides that Member States shall ensure that a payer has the right to make use of a payment initiation service provider to obtain payment services as referred to in point (7) of Annex I. It adds that the right to make use of a payment initiation service provider shall not apply where the payment account is not accessible online.
Two things follow for a merchant. Coverage is not a negotiation: a bank cannot decline to be initiated from because it would prefer the customer used its own app, so the reach question is which banks your provider has actually connected and how well, not which banks have agreed. And the second sentence is the real limit. Where an account is not accessible online the right does not arise, which is why coverage of business accounts, older products and some regional institutions is thinner than a coverage map suggests. Ask for a bank-level authorisation rate on your own traffic rather than a country list.
The regulatory direction favours this rail
Regulation (EU) 2024/886 required eurozone payment service providers to be able to receive instant euro payments from 9 January 2025 and send them from 9 October 2025, with fees no higher than for ordinary transfers, and to offer Verification of Payee from 9 October 2025. Instant, cheap, universally available account transfer is the foundation open banking payments were waiting for. Combined with Wero and the EuroPA alliance, the direction across Europe is clear: account-to-account is being built into infrastructure rather than bolted onto it.
Which payment provider supports Trustly?
Svea and Qliro in Sweden, alongside MultiSafepay and PayU, all document Trustly, many other European gateways do as well, and Trustly can be contracted directly. The useful questions are what you pay per transaction against your effective card rate at your average order value, whether conversion holds up against cards in your specific markets, and whether the line is visible separately rather than blended into an average.
Liability
When an initiation fails, the obligation sits with the customer’s own bank
The comparison with cards usually stops at ’there are no chargebacks’. What stands in place of one is worth knowing, because it decides who has to make the customer whole when a payment breaks in the middle.
Article 90(1) of Directive (EU) 2015/2366 provides that where a payment order is initiated by the payer through a payment initiation service provider, the account servicing payment service provider shall, without prejudice to Article 71 and Article 88(2) and (3), refund to the payer the amount of the non-executed or defective payment transaction and, where applicable, restore the debited payment account to the state in which it would have been had the defective payment transaction not taken place.
Read that against a card. When a card transaction misfires, the case arrives at your acquirer, is charged back to you, and you carry both the money and the case work. When an initiation fails, the obligation to restore the payer sits with the account servicing payment service provider, which is the customer’s own bank. This is about execution, not satisfaction: a customer who dislikes the goods is still your commercial dispute and always was. What moves is a whole category of failure you no longer administer, and administration is the cost that never appears on a rate card. It scales with your dispute rate rather than with your volume, which is why the categories pushing hardest towards this rail are the ones with the thinnest margin per order and the thickest support queue.
Reviewing what this costs you
What you pay for Trustly is set in your PSP contract. Start by establishing whether you are overpaying your PSP, or move straight to cutting your PSP costs, because a cheap method priced badly still costs more than it should.
A method that sends the customer off your site and back again puts the return path squarely in scope for checkout process optimisation.
Relevant markets: Europe, United States
Looking to reduce card processing costs with Open Banking? Let's see where Pay by Bank makes commercial sense for your business.
One conversation is enough to know whether there is anything here
A thirty-minute Teams call, on your own figures. You pay no upfront fee on any of the services. Nothing to prepare, the outline is enough.
