Accepting Billink as a merchant

Billink is a Dutch post-payment provider: the customer receives the order first and settles the invoice within 14 days. It serves both consumers and business buyers, and it operates in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. Among the deferred payment methods in a Dutch checkout it is the one most clearly built around invoice rather than instalments.

Economics

What the fee is actually for

Billink assesses the customer in real time, and where the order is accepted it guarantees payout to you. That is the whole proposition: you are buying the transfer of non-payment risk, the working capital between delivery and settlement, and the collections process that follows a missed invoice. It is not payment processing, so benchmarking it against an iDEAL fee produces a number that looks alarming and tells you nothing. Benchmark it against your own bad debt rate, your days sales outstanding and the cost of chasing invoices yourself.

You choose the payout term, and that is a cash decision

Billink lets the merchant select a payout term of 7, 14, 21 or 30 days. That is unusual enough to be worth naming, because it turns a payment method into a working capital lever. A shorter term improves your cash position and generally costs more; a longer one does the reverse. Most merchants accept whatever was configured at onboarding without ever pricing the difference, which is a decision made once and paid for continuously.

Both consumer and business buyers, priced differently

Billink covers B2C and B2B in one integration. Those are different risk profiles with different acceptance behaviour and different order values, and they should not be read as one line in your reporting. If you sell to both, the useful question is what each segment costs you and what each segment's acceptance rate is, rather than what your blended Billink rate is.

Billink One and the regulatory reason behind it

Billink One extends the proposition beyond post-payment to include paying now and paying a deposit with the remainder later, with purchase protection across all of them, alongside iDIN and itsme identity verification and real-time address, age and payment behaviour checks. Billink has been explicit that it built this in preparation for the second Consumer Credit Directive. That is the interesting part commercially: a provider adding non-credit routes to a credit product before the rules change is telling you what it expects the rules to do to acceptance rates.

Regulation

From 20 November 2026 post-payment is regulated consumer credit

Directive (EU) 2023/2225 repeals the 2008 Consumer Credit Directive with effect from 20 November 2026, and member states were required to transpose it by 20 November 2025. The exemption for credit repayable within a short period at insignificant cost disappears, which is the exemption invoice and instalment products have relied on. Providers come within national financial supervision, bringing licensing, mandatory creditworthiness assessment, credit register participation, stricter advertising rules and a prohibition on offering deferred payment to minors. Your provider carries the licence; you carry the declines. A share of customers accepted today will not be accepted afterwards, and unless a cheaper immediate method is presented well enough to catch them, that is an abandoned order rather than a cheaper one.

Payout term

What the payout term is worth, in euros

Seven, fourteen, twenty-one or thirty days is presented as a preference. It is a treasury decision priced in basis points, and the person who set it during onboarding was almost certainly not from treasury.

Take 4 million euros of annual Billink volume. Moving from a 30-day payout term to a 7-day one releases 23 days of working capital, which on that volume is about 252,000 euros permanently freed. At a 6 per cent cost of capital that is roughly 15,100 euros a year. So the shorter term is the cheaper choice as long as it costs you less than 15,100 euros more in fees, which on 4 million euros is 0.38 percentage points. If the difference between the two terms on your rate card is smaller than that, you are currently paying for patience you did not ask for.

The arithmetic runs the other way just as cleanly. If your business is cash-generative and your cost of capital is low, the 30-day term is close to free money and the shorter one is an expensive comfort. Either conclusion is defensible; what is not defensible is never having done the sum, which is where most merchants sit. Ask for the fee at each of the four terms in writing, put your own cost of capital next to it, and make the choice once a year rather than once ever.

Guarantee

What a guaranteed payout actually guarantees

Guaranteed payout is the phrase that sells the product, and it is doing more work in the sentence than in the contract. It covers non-payment by a buyer the provider accepted. It does not usually cover everything else that can go wrong with an order.

Three things sit outside it in most agreements and each of them lands on you. A dispute about the goods rather than about the payment, where the customer refuses the invoice because the item was wrong or late. A return against an open invoice, where the timing of the credit note and the timing of the collections cycle are not the same. And an order that turns out to fall outside the acceptance criteria after the fact, on address, age or identity, where the guarantee can be withdrawn retrospectively.

So put three questions in writing before the rate is even discussed. What invalidates the guarantee, and who decides. What happens to an open invoice when goods come back, and how quickly. And who speaks to the customer during collections, because to that customer the process happens in your name whether or not the receivable is still yours. A guarantee with a well-understood boundary is worth its fee. A guarantee nobody has read the exceptions to is a fee with a story attached.

Which payment provider supports Billink?

Buckaroo, MultiSafepay and Pay.nl all document Billink, among others, and Billink announced on 23 March 2026 that it also becomes available through Mollie. The useful questions are the fee as a percentage of order value, your acceptance rate by segment, which payout term you are on and what the alternatives cost, how returns interact with an open invoice, and what your provider expects to change on 20 November 2026.

Reviewing what this costs you

What you pay is set in your agreement, not by a scheme. Start by establishing whether you are overpaying your PSP, or put your own volume through the PSP Upside Calculator, because this is the method where the distance between a negotiated rate and a standard one is widest.

Relevant markets: Netherlands, Belgium, Germany