One Checkout Stack Across Markets

The real bottleneck is distribution, not technology. A global merchant wants one checkout stack that works across markets, so a UK only pay by bank option creates extra engineering, operations, and reconciliation work for too little volume. That is why card processors and payment gateways kept the advantage for years, they bundled many countries and methods behind one integration, while open banking started as a country by country add on.

• For Klarna, the upside of open banking was clear, direct bank payments could remove Visa and Mastercard processing costs and improve margins, but adoption depended on making bank payments feel like a standard checkout option across many markets, not a special UK flow.
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• This is the same problem payment gateways solved. Stripe says merchants can accept many local payment methods through a single integration, and Adyen positions itself around one platform for global and local methods. Merchants buy that simplicity because checkout teams do not want separate code paths by country.
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• The market has since moved toward folding pay by bank into existing gateways instead of asking merchants to bolt on a separate provider. Stripe launched Pay by Bank with TrueLayer in the UK, then expanded to France and Germany, which shows how open banking gets distributed once it rides inside a broader payments platform.
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Going forward, the winners are likely to be the companies that hide country level banking complexity behind one merchant integration. That favors gateways, orchestration layers, and large platforms like Klarna if they can turn pay by bank into a default button inside an existing checkout flow, instead of a separate local project.