Accept better: Get paid without the fees, failures and outages of cards

For years, businesses have accepted a lot: paying to receive money they've already earned, absorbing failure rates as "the cost of doing business," and treating outages as inevitable. None of it was ever compulsory. It's just what everyone inherited, and everyone accepted. Until now.

Pay by Bank is not a new idea. Account-to-account payments have been around for years, and GoCardless has spent almost 15 years making bank payments work properly. What's changing is how many businesses are moving to it. Pay by Bank is cheaper, more direct and more reliable than card payments, and the businesses making the switch are collecting more, losing less, and no longer waiting for money that's already theirs.

What businesses have been accepting

Fees

Card fees add up fast. UK businesses paid over £1.48bn in card fees last year, more than double what they paid in 2019. It's a cut taken on every transaction by parties who weren't in the room when the sale was made (source: BRC Payment Survey Report, 2025). The cost gap between cards and bank payments isn't marginal either: moving the same money can cost up to four times as much with cards (source: GoCardless website price comparison, 2026).

Failures

A card expires, a limit is hit, a network has a bad day, and businesses absorb the time and resources to chase it, calling it business as usual. Every failed payment means a delay, an awkward conversation, or a customer lost for reasons that have nothing to do with whether they wanted to pay.

Outages

Behind the fees and the failures sits infrastructure that wasn't built for today's economy. Card rails were designed in the 1950s. Every generation since has bolted something new on top (mag stripe, chip, contactless) without changing the foundations. When that infrastructure has a bad day, outages ripple through the business, and it still gets treated as normal.

What "better" looks like

Pay by bank means you can collect payments directly from one bank account to another. 

Keeping more of your hard-earned money. Pay by Bank is around 54% cheaper than card payments on average, so more of every transaction stays with your business instead of disappearing into fees.

Built without the flaws cards have to live with. Bank details don't expire like cards do, and they can't be lost or stolen. GoCardless customers see payment failure rates as low as 0.5–2.9%, compared with 10–15% for card payments (source: GoCardless Payment Success Index).

A better experience for your customers. Redirecting customers to their own banking app, and letting them authorise with biometrics, makes paying simple and secure. Because payments are instant, everyone knows exactly where they stand.

A seat at the table as the industry evolves. Open banking keeps moving forward. Variable Recurring Payments (VRPs) are the next step. They enable recurring account-to-account payments in a similar way to Direct Debit, but with the speed and security of open banking, and the flexibility to vary the amount and timing of each payment. Today, VRPs work for "sweeping" payments between accounts owned by the same person. Commercial VRPs are next, opening this up to payments from a customer's account to a business account. That's a real opportunity for sectors like utilities and ecommerce that currently rely on Direct Debit or card-on-file.

Why GoCardless

We've spent nearly 15 years on bank payments, and nothing else. We didn't invent account-to-account payments, but we made them usable: something any business could set up, run and rely on. Along the way, we helped shape the policy frameworks the industry runs on today, and we were one of the first to bring Variable Recurring Payments to market.

That focus now supports over 100,000 businesses across 30+ markets, processing more than $130bn a year, on one platform built for every kind of bank payment. 

Accept better. Accept Pay by Bank.