Accepting Trustly as a merchant

You contract with Trustly directly or enable it through your PSP. The payment is initiated from the customer’s bank environment, so authentication is handled by the bank and the funds position is confirmed at checkout. There is no card network in the chain, which is precisely why the economics differ.

Open banking acceptance is not a commercial arrangement negotiated bank by bank. It rests on a right the directive gives the customer, and knowing the exact wording changes the questions you put to a provider.

Article 66(1) of Directive (EU) 2015/2366 provides that Member States shall ensure that a payer has the right to make use of a payment initiation service provider to obtain payment services as referred to in point (7) of Annex I. It adds that the right to make use of a payment initiation service provider shall not apply where the payment account is not accessible online.

Two things follow for a merchant. Coverage is not a negotiation: a bank cannot decline to be initiated from because it would prefer the customer used its own app, so the reach question is which banks your provider has actually connected and how well, not which banks have agreed. And the second sentence is the real limit. Where an account is not accessible online the right does not arise, which is why coverage of business accounts, older products and some regional institutions is thinner than a coverage map suggests. Ask for a bank-level authorisation rate on your own traffic rather than a country list.

Svea and Qliro in Sweden, alongside MultiSafepay and PayU, all document Trustly, many other European gateways do as well, and Trustly can be contracted directly. The useful questions are what you pay per transaction against your effective card rate at your average order value, whether conversion holds up against cards in your specific markets, and whether the line is visible separately rather than blended into an average.

What you pay for Trustly is set in your PSP contract. Start by establishing whether you are overpaying your PSP, or move straight to cutting your PSP costs, because a cheap method priced badly still costs more than it should.

A method that sends the customer off your site and back again puts the return path squarely in scope for checkout process optimisation.

Relevant markets: Europe, United States