Payment Initiation Services (PIS)

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 and illustrated a core set of payment initiation journeys.

PIS Core Journeys

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 PISP¹.

¹FCA consultation on updated Approach to RTS and EBA guidelines under revised PSD2 and CEG Checklist Reference ref 21