NAB partners UK fintech Banked to boost merchant adoption of A2A payment solutions
National Australia Bank (NAB) has partnered with UK-based fintech firm Banked to increase the uptake of account-to-account (A2A) payment solutions among Australian merchants.
NAB seeks A2A uptake through Banked partnership
The partnership is to leverage Pay by Bank technology – a form of direct debit which enables consumers to transact online directly from their bank account – through the PayTo services of Sydney-based tech provider Australian Payments Plus.
For merchants, Pay by Bank will enable PayTo agreements to be sent to customers to initiate payments and refunds, addressing what the pair state as “a range of scenarios” incurred by checkouts, such as online payments, scheduled recurring payments and split payment amounts.
The first group of NAB business clients to adopt the functionality are to go live with A2A payments “in the first half of 2024”.
Shane Conway, executive general manager of transaction banking and enterprise solutions at NAB, says A2A payments offer “compelling benefits for certain use cases”, harbouring “an economic benefit for merchants” in the form of lower operating costs, loyalty scheme differentiation and fraud mitigation.
Its partnership with Banked follows a string of initiatives actioned by the bank in recent months to strike client-wide innovation, including the introduction of NAB Liquidity+, an AI-powered corporate cash management, analytics and forecasting platform developed in partnership with Trovata, launched in October of last year.
Internally, the bank has been guided by the leadership of group CEO Andrew Irvine since the retirement of Ross McEwan in April.
