Today, TrueLayer, Europe’s largest open banking payments network, launches payment links, a new feature that enables businesses to offer instant payments, powered by open banking, directly from an email, text message or a QR code.
To use payment links, a customer scans a QR code or clicks an online link - whether that’s through an email, chatbot conversation, text message - which takes them straight to their online bank accounts to make the payment directly to the business. This functionality can be used either online or as part of the in-store shopping experience.
Payment links are part of a new generation of innovative instant payment tools, all built to transform the payments experience and further expand the use cases for open banking in retail, ecommerce and beyond. Combined with TrueLayer’s reach across Europe, this new feature will accelerate the growth of open banking payments further into the mainstream.
Payment links simplify the process of building a payments page by letting businesses create checkout pages within minutes, without the need for a website or third-party ecommerce platform integration.
For example, retailers will be able to use payment links in email remarketing to target cart abandonment, businesses can use them for smoother invoicing, and charities can use them to streamline in-person donations.
Payment links are already live with TrueLayer customers, including Topps Tiles, which has over 300 stores nationwide, and Southampton’s Solent Wholesale, one of the South West region’s leading carpet wholesalers. Both are using TrueLayer’s new product feature to improve invoicing by automating the process via email, reducing payment processing costs and simplifying the payment for their customers, in turn increasing their cash flow.
Michael Brown, Head of Ecommerce at TrueLayer, said:
“Legacy payment options such as cards simply haven’t kept up with the experiences customers and businesses have come to expect when making a purchase. These methods take days to settle, are highly frictional and often require a lot of resources to build payment infrastructure.
Powered by open banking, payment links are an easy to implement, instant to settle solution that will allow merchants to accept open banking payments anywhere: across their marketing channels, emails, texts and even in-store.
TrueLayer’s payment links are yet another proof point of how open banking can be used to transform business payments and consumer experiences. It once again demonstrates TrueLayer’s commitment to pushing what’s possible with open banking payments.”
Luke Crooks, Director at Solent Wholesale Carpets, said: “With TrueLayer’s payment links, we can automatically send invoice payment requests from our CRM, and the payments settle in real-time. By using TrueLayer, we’ve been able to save on payment processing costs vs cards. Plus, the end-to-end integration time took less than 48 hours.
We chose TrueLayer because of their responsive support team, extensive online documentation and GitHub tools which made the integration process quick and easy.”