Accepting BECS Direct Debit as a merchant

A business that debits through BECS needs a Direct Entry User ID, which AusPayNet issues through a sponsoring financial institution, or a provider that holds one. For most merchants that is a PSP. Stripe states that BECS Direct Debit is available to Stripe accounts in Australia only, so through Stripe you need an Australian entity. GoCardless, which operates as GoCardless, a Mollie company, since Mollie completed its acquisition on 1 September 2026, lets businesses based in the United Kingdom and in most EU countries sign up, and states that BECS lets them collect Australian dollar payments from a bank account in Australia. Ezidebit, part of Global Payments, sells direct debit to Australian businesses.

The entity you contract from therefore decides which routes are open to you, and as the pricing section shows, possibly which price applies.

BECS is Australian and the debit is in Australian dollars only: Stripe lists Australia as the customer location and AUD as the only presentment currency. The rail carries far more than retail. AusPayNet states that direct entry carries average yearly values of more than 15 trillion Australian dollars, and the Reserve Bank of Australia describes BECS as the country's largest retail payment system by value, carrying most salary, welfare and pension payments.

For a European merchant that means a payment method Australian customers know from their own salary and their own bills. It fits recurring and invoice-based sales: software subscriptions, memberships, education, B2B services. It is not built for a one-off checkout where the goods leave the warehouse before the payment is confirmed.

AusPayNet communicated an intention to decommission BECS by 2030. In December 2025 it removed the target end date of June 2030, after the industry determined it could not achieve it, and stated it would not set a new date until a roadmap for account-to-account payments exists. The industry roundtable aims to deliver that roadmap by the end of 2026. BECS keeps running, and a migration is still the stated direction.

Stripe already offers PayTo and documents a migration from BECS to PayTo, in which a BECS mandate does not carry over: each customer has to approve a new PayTo mandate, which their bank presents to them, typically by push notification or email. Every customer who does not approve stops paying on the new rail. As an illustration, 5,000 mandates at A$600 a year with one in five customers not approving puts A$600,000 of annual billing, about 360,000 euro at the same illustrative rate, outside the new rail. Keep customer contact data current for every mandate, so that a re-authorisation round can reach everyone.

Because the result of a debit is only known days later, a failed payment is a service the customer has already used. Stripe charges A$2.50 for each failed BECS payment and states that it does not charge the failure fee on retries it initiates automatically, at most four per payment and within 30 days of the first attempt. A permanent failure sets the mandate to inactive, and further payments need a new mandate.

Stripe also sets a default limit for new users of A$10,000 per transaction and A$10,000 per week, raised on request. For B2B invoices that limit is reached quickly, so agree it before the first invoice run rather than after the first rejected debit.

What you pay for BECS Direct Debit is set in your agreement with your PSP, not by a scheme. Start by establishing whether you are overpaying your PSP, and where Australian subscriptions are a material share of your revenue, price the route from your own entity against the route from an Australian one before you renew.

Relevant markets: Australia