Customer Experience Guidelines

Payment Initiation Services

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This is the latest version Published 3 months ago 28 Jun 2024

One of the primary ambitions of the Customer Experience Guidelines is to provide simplification and consistency throughout each stage of the Open Banking implementation. As such, we have defined a core set of payment initiation journeys.

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Open Banking API specifications support Payment Initiation Services (PIS) that enable a PISP to initiate a payment order, with the PSU’s explicit consent, from their online payment account held at their ASPSP. The PISP is then further able to retrieve the status of a payment order. This section describes how each of the Participants (PISPs and ASPSPs) in the delivery of these services can optimise the customer experience for these services. Furthermore, it provides some clarifications to these Participants on the usage of the APIs which are not covered by the technical specifications, and some best practice guidelines for implementation of the customer journeys.

Please note that ASPSPs do not need to support the initiation of certain payment methods described in this section by a PISP, where the ASPSP does not support such transactions through any of their own online channels (such as future dated foreign transactions and bulk payment files).

If the customer is able to initiate, for example, international payments, recurring transactions or a batch file of payments online, they should also be able to do so via a PISP, irrespective of the channel the customer has used to access the PISP.[1]

1FCA consultation on updated Approach to RTS and EBA guidelines under revised PSD2 and CEG Checklist Reference

Single Domestic Payments

Account Selection at PISP

Where all information for a complete payment order is passed from PISPs to ASPSPs, once authenticated, PSUs must be directed back to the PISP domain without any further steps taking place in the ASPSP domain.

Account Selection at PISP – Supplementary Info

In some scenarios, an additional step in ASPSPs' journeys may be required to display supplementary information to PSUs. ASPSPs should determine the situations where this supplementary information is required, having regard to the principle that parity should be maintained between Open Banking journeys and ASPSPs’ online channel journeys.

BACS and CHAPS

In some scenarios, an additional step in ASPSPs' journeys may be required to display supplementary information to PSUs. ASPSPs should determine the situations where this supplementary information is required, having regard to the principle that parity should be maintained between Open Banking journeys and ASPSPs’ online channel journeys.

Account Selection at ASPSP

Open Banking Ltd (OBL) considers that SCA only needs to be obtained once, as part of the initial interaction between ASPSPs and the PSU. The fact that the PSU has to then carry out account selection or provide other information does not invalidate the SCA just performed by the ASPSP.

Scheduled Payments – Future Dated

Through a PISP the PSUs can setup an instruction to their ASPSP to make a one-off payment for a specified amount to a specified payee – on a specified future date.