Visa Launches A2A Payments With Guarantees

Visa building

Visa A2A’s latest update, announced this morning (June 2), connects card-style buyer protections onto pay-by-bank transfers, promising U.K. consumers and merchants a safety net that the market’s open-banking rails have largely lacked.

    Get the Full Story

    Complete the form to unlock this article and enjoy unlimited free access to all PYMNTS content — no additional logins required.

    yesSubscribe to our daily newsletter, PYMNTS Today.

    By completing this form, you agree to receive marketing communications from PYMNTS and to the sharing of your information with our sponsor, if applicable, in accordance with our Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions.

    According to Visa, its A2A platform is “market-ready” for bill and subscription payments, with eCommerce to follow. Built on Pay.UK’s Faster Payment System, the service lets consumers authorize recurring bank transfers inside their mobile-banking apps and integrates Visa’s dispute-resolution rules to reimburse customers when errors occur. That recourse, long standard on card rails, could help coax mainstream users toward open-banking payments.

    Businesses stand to gain near-real-time settlement, instant alerts when a customer revokes permission and richer data fields for reconciliation. Visa is pitching the product as an open model in which banks and FinTechs can plug in and help modernize pay-by-bank while maintaining a commercial structure “that works for all participants.” The company argues wider adoption could unlock £328 billion in economic output over the next five years — an estimate that underscores the stakes for the U.K. as it tries to keep its FinTech edge.

    The first wave of partners, including data-aggregator Plaid, is slated to bring Visa A2A to market later this year. “This partnership brings together Visa’s trusted rails and Plaid’s open-banking network to make pay-by-bank as simple and secure as card on file. It’s a new standard for how consumers and businesses move money — fast, protected, and ready to scale,” said Zak Lambert, Plaid Europe’s head of product.

    PYMNTS has tracked Visa’s A2A journey from its €1.8 billion acquisition of Swedish open-banking platform Tink in 2021 through May 2024 when the network rolled out “Visa Protect for A2A Payments,” an AI-driven fraud screen that Visa said detected 54 percent more scams than banks’ own systems, to a September 2024 deep-dive in which Visa Europe product chief Mehret Habteab described how early bill-payment pilots were giving utilities and telecoms real-time visibility while letting consumers fine-tune payment mandates on the fly.

    Today’s U.K. rollout is Visa’s most direct challenge yet to the notion that open-banking payments must sacrifice protection for lower cost. Visa plans to layer one-click A2A checkout onto eCommerce “in phases” later this year — extending its guarantee to online retail at a moment when rising fraud has tempered enthusiasm for direct-from-account payments.