Accepting Clearpay as a merchant

Clearpay is the brand under which the Afterpay instalment proposition operates in the United Kingdom and parts of Europe. The customer pays in instalments, you are paid the full order value up front, and Clearpay carries the credit decision and the receivable.

Economics

You are buying credit and conversion, not processing

The fee is materially above card acceptance because it prices credit risk transfer and working capital rather than transaction handling. Benchmarking it against a card rate produces a conclusion that looks alarming and means nothing. The only comparison that carries information is against the additional revenue it generates from customers who would otherwise have abandoned.

The substitution question decides the business case

Every merchant offering instalments has some customers using it who would have paid immediately on a cheaper method. That is not incremental revenue; it is existing revenue at a higher cost. Measuring the split between genuinely incremental orders and substituted ones is the entire exercise, and it is measurable through checkout behaviour rather than guesswork.

Presentation drives substitution more than demand does

Where the method sits in your payment selector, how prominently instalment messaging appears on product pages, and whether it is preselected all move the substitution rate significantly. That is a design decision with a direct cost consequence, and it is usually made by a team that does not see the fee.

Which payment provider supports Clearpay in the UK and Europe?

Global Payments, Cybersource and Airwallex all document Clearpay, as do most major gateways serving these markets. The useful questions are the fee as a percentage of order value, when you are paid, how returns interact with the instalment schedule, and what your incremental conversion actually is rather than your total conversion.

Regulation

In the United Kingdom this is already regulated

The Financial Conduct Authority began regulating Deferred Payment Credit on 15 July 2026. DPC is interest-free credit repayable in 12 or fewer instalments over 12 months or less, which is exactly this product. Third-party lenders now need FCA authorisation or a temporary permission, the Consumer Duty applies, affordability checks are mandatory and customers can complain to the Financial Ombudsman Service. Agreements entered into before that date remain exempt. Merchants who offer their own deferred payment directly are not caught, but merchants using a third-party lender will see the effects at the payment step in the form of declines that did not happen before. Separately, in EU markets Directive (EU) 2023/2225 brings the same product within regulated consumer credit from 20 November 2026, so a merchant selling into both is managing two regimes on two dates.

Fallback

What a decline costs, and what is supposed to catch it

Affordability checking produces declines. Everyone writing about the new regimes says so. Almost nobody says what a decline costs or where the money goes, which is a pity, because that is the part a merchant can actually do something about.

Numbers. Take 6 million euros of UK and European revenue with 20 per cent presented as instalments, so 1.2 million euros attempted across 4,000 orders at 300 euros. Suppose acceptance falls five points once affordability checking is mandatory. That is 200 orders a year, 60,000 euros of attempted revenue, and every one of them arrives at the moment a customer has already chosen how to pay and been told no.

What happens next is entirely a function of your checkout. If a declined customer is returned to a page that still shows the option they just failed, most of them leave. If they land on a selector with a card and an account transfer already visible, and a line of copy that does not read as a personal rejection, a large share complete. The distance between those two designs, on 60,000 euros of at-risk revenue, is somewhere between nothing and all of it, and it is a front-end change rather than a commercial negotiation. So the work that matters here is not the rate. It is what the customer sees, in what words, with which alternatives already loaded, and whether anyone in your business has ever looked at that screen. Ask your provider to walk you through the decline flow now rather than discovering it in your support queue in December.

Two regimes

Two regimes, two dates, one checkout

The UK regime started on 15 July 2026. The EU one starts on 20 November 2026. If you sell into both, that is not one project with two deadlines. It is two projects, because the regimes differ in what they require and in whom they bind.

The differences worth writing down are these. The UK rules bind third-party lenders and leave merchants offering their own deferred payment outside them, and agreements entered into before 15 July 2026 remain exempt, so your UK book has a cut-off date running through it. The EU change removes the exemption that interest-free instalment products relied on and brings providers under national financial supervision from 20 November, and the pages describing the product have to satisfy the stricter information and advertising rules that come with it.

Two consequences follow for anyone selling into both. Your acceptance rate steps down twice, at two different dates, in two different customer populations, so a single European instalment figure will show two shocks and explain neither: split the reporting by regime before November, not after. And your instalment messaging has to satisfy two sets of rules across two sets of pages, which makes it a content problem rather than a payments one, owned by a team that is not reading this page. Forward it to them.

Reviewing what this costs you

What you pay is set in your agreement, not by the 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: United Kingdom, Europe