As a scaling payment services provider (PSP) researching payment infrastructure companies, you’ve probably outgrown conventional payment solutions, but might not have the resources to create infrastructure in-house.

You might be looking for:

• Greater customisation of your payment flow than basic payment platforms allow. You want to offer white labelling to your merchants to improve your competitiveness.
• A payment provider that can support higher transaction volumes, without incurring high fees.
• Highly secure payment technology, particularly if you’re working in regulated industries like crypto or iGaming.

In this guide, we’ll run through what to look for in a payment infrastructure company so you can make the best choice for your business.

We’ll cover:

• Four questions to ask when choosing a payment infrastructure company to work with
• Why you should consider open banking as a payment method
• Why you should work with Yapily, Europe’s leading open banking infrastructure provider for payments and data.
• How inbestMe works with Yapily to democratise investment

Considering adding Pay by Bank through open banking to your payment offerings? Yapily has some of the most extensive coverage in the UK and EU, and a broad range of payment types. To find out how we can support your business, get in touch with an expert

Five questions to ask when choosing a payment infrastructure company

1. Does the platform offer the customisation your merchants want (like white-labeling)?

PSPs often seek new solutions based on more adaptable payment infrastructure to meet their merchants’ increasing demands for greater flexibility—something traditional payment solutions often struggle to deliver. For many scaling merchants, optimising payment performance goes hand in hand with providing a fully branded payment experience.

This branded experience not only boosts conversion rates and reduces cart abandonment but also builds stronger customer loyalty. By offering solutions that enable merchants to achieve these goals, PSPs can position themselves as valuable, growth-focused partners.

2. Does the platform offer the strength and features your merchants need?

Scaling merchants expect more from their payment infrastructure than simple processing. They want access to features that enhance their operations and support growth, such as recurring payments, data services, and seamless integration with other tools. A robust payment infrastructure can support these needs within a single platform, reducing the complexity and cost of managing multiple providers.

Scalability is equally important. A reliable infrastructure should be well-tested and capable of handling large transaction volumes without compromising performance. Look for providers that offer enterprise-grade support and maintain high levels of uptime and low latency. These features ensure you can meet your merchants’ expectations while delivering a dependable and cost-efficient solution.

By focusing on platform strength and advanced capabilities, you can attract and retain merchants looking for a payment partner that truly supports their growth ambitions.

3. Does the platform have the coverage you need?

Card networks like Visa and Mastercard are household names and a cornerstone of global payment systems, providing global coverage. However, this broad coverage comes with high fees, and there may be more affordable alternatives depending on where you want to offer online payments.

Ultimately, your merchants don’t particularly care how their payments work. They care that they work, and that they can send and accept payments in the areas they want. It’s coverage, not big names, that matters to them.

4. Can you scale and process large volumes without high fees?

If your chosen payment infrastructure relies heavily on card networks, the associated fees can quickly add up, forcing you to pass these costs onto your merchants. This not only eats into their margins, but also makes your pricing less competitive.

To avoid this, look for providers that offer more affordable alternatives, such as open banking, which eliminates many of the fees tied to card payments. Consider if the infrastructure supports key features like recurring payments and data services within a single platform—this reduces the need for multiple providers, which can drive up costs even further.

While cost is key, scalability also requires confidence in the provider’s infrastructure. Robust, well-tested systems with enterprise-grade support ensure you can scale without compromising on reliability or performance, giving your merchants a dependable and cost-efficient solution.

Learn about the benefits of open banking payments over card networks: Open banking vs card networks: the future of payments

5. How secure is the infrastructure platform (and will they service your industry)?

It goes without saying that your chosen infrastructure platform must meet industry-standard certifications and comply with regulations like GDPR and PSD2. The platform’s architecture will also impact security—platforms leveraging open banking, for example, employ Strong Customer Authentication (SCA) for fraud prevention.

Equally important is ensuring the platform aligns with your industry. If you’re in a regulated sector like crypto, some providers might hesitate to work with you. That’s why it’s crucial to choose a platform you can rely on to support your business needs.

Why consider an open banking provider as your payment infrastructure platform?

Open banking is a modern banking model that leverages APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to securely share financial data and initiate transactions between banks and authorised third-party providers. Using this innovative process allows businesses and consumers to access faster, more flexible payment methods directly from their bank accounts, bypassing traditional card networks.

In regions where open banking payments are supported — which now covers over two-thirds of the globe — each bank provides its own API, enabling authorised third parties to initiate instant account-to-account payments and access transaction data. By partnering with an open banking provider, you can tap into these capabilities through a single, unified API.

But why choose open banking over a traditional payment provider?

Let’s explore the key advantages:

• Instant account-to-account payments. Traditional card payments take up to three days to settle, while recurring payment solutions like Direct Debit take three to five days for funds to land in the merchant’s account. With open banking, payments are instant and occur directly from one account to another, with no intermediaries involved.

  Do you work with merchants who offer recurring payments and are tired of the limitation of Direct Debit? Find out more: Variable Recurring Payments vs Direct Debit: The next wave in payment innovation

• Low-cost service. With open banking, merchants don’t face the same per-transaction fees associated with traditional card payments. Removing intermediaries like card issuers or acquirers eliminates the extra fees of card payment systems, for more affordable end-to-end payments.

  As a PSP, this means you can offer your merchants a more cost-effective payment solution while maintaining competitive margins. Each open banking platform will have its own pricing, usually customised based on your business size and needs.

• Secure and reliable infrastructure. According to the European Banking Authority, card payments have the highest incidence of fraud in terms of the total number of impacted transactions. What’s more, recurring card payments can be disrupted by lost or cancelled cards or insufficient funds.

  Direct Debit can also be affected by high failure rates. When using this system, PSPs need to store customer authorisation documents, which can be vulnerable to hacks.

  Alternatively, open banking runs through secure APIs. End customers still need to give authorisation, which happens through the bank’s own portal. However, you do not need to store your end users’ documentation.

• Reliable at high volumes. Depending on the provider you choose, you can reliably run high volumes of transactions through open banking APIs.

  You also have much greater flexibility over payment options—such as bulk payments and variable recurring payments (VRP). Plus, you can offer data services (Account Information Services). For instance, if a merchant wants to offer a data-enabled credit product alongside accepting payment, you can enable them to access customers’ financial data via the same open banking solution.

• White-label solution. With customisable user interfaces offered by some open banking providers (like Yapily), you can embed payment flows directly into your apps and user flows.

Now you’ve seen the benefits of using an open banking payment infrastructure company, here’s why you should consider using Yapily.

Why work with Yapily’s platform for payments and data services?

Yapily is one of Europe’s leading open banking infrastructure platform supporting both payments and data services. Trusted by companies like Volt, Emma, and Pleo, we provide coverage across 19 countries and connect with nearly 2,000 banks and financial institutions.

We’re focused on providing infrastructure for PSPs to build bispoke solutions, rather than building applications at the product layer. This means that, unlike many other platforms, we’re not targeting merchants ourselves—so there’s no competition between us and you as a PSP.

Let’s look at three more reasons you should partner with Yapily as a payment infrastructure company.

1. You’ll scale effortlessly thanks to our robust API, enterprise-level support, and industry-leading security

At Yapily, our focus is on supporting businesses, including those in high-risk industries such as crypto or i-Gaming. While there are many open banking solutions out there, few have a focus on supporting large transaction volumes. Instead, many have APIs that struggle at higher volumes.

That’s why we rigorously test our API to ensure it operates reliably at scale so we can achieve industry-leading uptimes and low latency. We test it using real accounts, including both consumer and business accounts, so that you can reliably support all types of merchants—B2B or B2C—of any size.

There are other ways we’ll support your growth too. We’ve built an easy-to-integrate API and we provide dedicated support to ensure onboarding goes smoothly and quickly. But we’ll also help you meet regulatory requirements and, if you need, we can help you enter new markets.

Security is a priority for us. Our API is ISO 27001 certified, meaning that you’ll have enterprise-grade security you can trust.

2. You can offer your merchants a wide range of payment and data services

Until now, businesses have often needed to accept payments as Direct Debits or using card payments. While they’re familiar to customers, they often require inconvenient steps such as entering card details or setting up a Direct Debit for a particular date.

What’s more, these methods lack sophistication. If a customer’s account doesn’t have sufficient funds, the payment simply fails, causing problems for both the merchant and customer. With Direct Debit this often results in additional charges for the merchant.

Instead, alongside immediate or scheduled payments, Yapily’s open banking infrastructure supports a wide range of smart payment types:

• Sweeping variable recurring payments (VRP) allow end users to move sums between their own accounts based on set parameters. So, if a current account has more than a certain amount, that surplus sum is transferred automatically into a savings account. Or, if there are insufficient funds in an account when payment is scheduled, fund will be taken from an alternitive account to top it up—instead of the payment failing.

• Bulk payments, with which end users can make multiple payments at the same time, saving costs for the merchant.

• Business account payments. Many open banking platforms don’t support business account connectivity at all, as it typically requires a separate API. At Yapily, we connect with business, consumer, and wealth accounts, so you can benefit from open banking, whomever your end users are.

Plus, you can use Yapily for data services. As well as initiating payments through our infrastructure, your merchants can access real-time transaction data via our API. We’re one of the few open banking providers that’s focused equally on both payments and data.

Because Yapily is both a payment initiation service provider and an account information service provider, you don’t need to worry about getting your business authorised. You can simply use our authorisation.

3. Fully customise the payment experience for your merchants’ end users

Open banking lets you provide a fully flexible payment experience to your end users. But to take advantage of that, you need an infrastructure platform, like Yapily, that has a customisable payment flow.

We provide the open banking technology on which you can build your products. We trust that you know your users’ needs better than anyone else—and we’ll support you to meet them.

As such, our infrastructure is fully white-labeled. You can fully integrate our open banking infrastructure into your apps or platform, helping you increase conversions and reduce abandonment with a seamless customer experience that’s built around your brand.

We also have a hosted solution that can help you get started faster. It means that you don’t need to design and set up your user flow from scratch or you can get to market with open banking payments quickly while building your bespoke solution on our infrastructure.

How Crezco uses Yapily to help SMEs simplify payments and boost cash flow

Crezco—a London-based payment solution provider—is on a mission to make payments easy for small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Supporting over 5,000 businesses, Crezco’s platform helps address key pain points like late payments, high fees, and time-consuming reconciliation processes that hinder cash flow and business growth.

To achieve this, Crezco leveraged Yapily’s open banking infrastructure. By integrating Yapily Payments, Crezco enables SMEs to process account-to-account payments instantly and securely. This feature bypasses traditional card networks, reducing costs and allowing businesses to settle payments faster. Additionally, Yapily Validate streamlines onboarding by verifying customer account details in real-time, minimising fraud risk and removing the need for manual paperwork.

The results have been transformative. Crezco’s customers have reduced debtor days by an average of 27%, with some achieving reductions of up to 66%. SMEs have also saved significant costs—around £1,000 in fees for every 25 invoices—and seen a 71% year-to-date increase in account-to-account payments.

Crezco’s integration with Yapily provides businesses with an automated, cost-effective payment solution that boosts efficiency and cash flow, empowering SMEs to focus on growth.

Read the full case study: How Crezco & Yapily are optimising payments for SMEs

Choose Yapily as your open banking payment infrastructure provider

In this guide, you’ve discovered some of the key features to look for in a payment infrastructure company. But if you’re interested in a flexible, scalable, and affordable solution for instant payments, you don’t need to look any further than Yapily’s open banking infrastructure.

With Yapily, we’re an enterprise-ready solution that can support your merchants in the United Kingdom and Europe. Get in touch to learn more.