Visa Launches A2A Payments With Guarantees

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.

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.