Worldpay To Roll Out Mastercard’s Pay by Bank App for E-Commerce in the U.K.

Payment processor Worldpay Inc. said it will bring Mastercard Inc.’s Pay by Bank mobile and online payment application to its United Kingdom merchants in early 2019, and also will use other Mastercard digital services.

Launched in 2016 by London-based payment-technology developer Vocalink, which Mastercard acquired in May 2017, Pay by Bank enables customers of British businesses to pay for goods and services via their bank’s mobile-banking app or online service, with funds coming directly from their bank account. The deal with Worldpay could give a big boost to Pay by Bank’s distribution given that Worldpay is a leading merchant acquirer in the U.K. and Europe. The former London-based Worldpay Group plc had about 400,000 merchants at the time of its January merger with Cincinnati-based processor Vantiv Inc., with the combined company taking the Worldpay name, although the exact number in the U.K. was not immediately available.

“Through this partnership, Worldpay and Mastercard will help expand payments acceptance options for U.K. consumers and retailers by leveraging account-to-account payments technology with Mastercard’s Pay by Bank app,” Kevin McCarten, chief strategy and marketing officer at Worldpay, said in a news release. “This—combined with our joint efforts in making digital payments even more convenient and secure globally—creates a powerful partnership that benefits all payments stakeholders.”

Vocalink developed the U.K.’s Faster Payments service, and its technology is a key component of the Real Time Payments system from New York-based The Clearing House.

Worldpay plans to bring Pay by Bank to more markets, though the company didn’t say exactly when. “The Pay by Bank solution, as well as others coming from this partnership, will be rolled out in prioritized fashion to European markets, the U.S. as well as other markets that have the most immediate need for this capability,” a Worldpay spokesperson tells Digital Transactions Newsby email. Combined, Vantiv/Worldpay have about 1.2 million merchants globally.

“We’re maximizing each other’s ability to provide the choices in fast and convenient ways to pay,” Mark Barnett, Mastercard’s president for the U.K., Ireland, Nordics, and Baltics region, said in the release. “In particular, [the] Pay by Bank app is set to play a big role in U.K. digital commerce, as more banks and merchants offer this as a payment option to millions of their customers.”

Worldpay also said it will support the Secure Remote Commerce initiative from payment standards body EMVCo that could replace a plethora of network buy buttons on e-commerce sites with a common button. Worldpay further announced its usage of Mastercard’s Digital Enablement Service, which provides tokenization of account numbers, and the Mastercard MoneySend  system that moves payments in near real time.