Money in seconds – Open Banking Payments deliver cash in “real-time” to give merchants a helping hand

For years, merchants have been become accustomed to waiting for their money from the card schemes.  If you are big, you will receive it next day after a payment was made.  But for many smaller and higher risk merchants, the wait is longer.  If you don’t have the volumes and bargaining power, then you could typically expect to wait anywhere up to 7 days to receive the money from your card payments from your acquirer.  This just creates a cash flow challenge for you – one that is exacerbated in the current environment.

With Open Banking, we promise our UK merchants that payments are “real-time”.  That is, they’ll receive their cash in their account in real-time, free and unencumbered, and available for them to make payments.

We are often asked: “When you say real-time, how quickly will I actually receive the money?”   So we took our payments data last week, to find out exactly how quick it is.

Payments in as little as FOUR seconds.

The answer is that Open Banking is fast.  For the fastest payments, the merchant received money in their account in as little as 4 seconds.  That is, 4 seconds after the payer completed the authorisation, the money was sitting in the merchant’s account at Nuapay, available for them to use to move or make other payments.  FOUR SECONDS!  And that isn’t unusual – approximately 5% of payments arrive that fast.

Looking more broadly at data across the week, the average payment took approximately 6 seconds until it was available to the merchant, while 98.5% of payments were received by the merchant in 10 seconds or less.  While a small number of payments took more than 10 seconds, no Open Banking payment took more than 15 seconds – proving that Open Banking is not only fast and real-time, but it is consistent and reliable too.

Refunds are just as fast.

While our analysis focused on the inbound payments, outbound payments are transmitted across the same network, with refunds or pay-outs sent to customers in real-time too.  This means, if you need to pay a customer back because they were unhappy, you could initiate a refund on our Nuapay platform, and that customer would have the cash in their bank account in somewhere between 4-15 seconds.

Now that is an incredible experience to delight your customers with, and it puts an end to “pending” payments on card statements or customers calling up to find out where their refund or pay-out has gone.  Another reason to ditch the card payments, and move to Open Banking.

Note: All data is taken from the 7 days up to and including 28th September for all Open Banking Payments received on the Nuapay platform.  The time is measured from the “OAuth Callback Complete” status (when the payer has completed the authorisation of the payment) to the “Payment Received” status where Nuapay has received the money in the merchant’s account, and a webhook is sent to the merchant to notify them of this.