Open banking continues to scale across the UK, with millions of consumers now using account-to-account payments in their everyday financial lives. But while adoption is rising, awareness of the term used to describe these payments tells a more complex story.

The Yaspa index sets out to ask the crucial question: How familiar are UK consumers with the term ‘Pay by Bank’ in 2026 and it tracks how that familiarity has shifted over the past year, and what people really prioritise when choosing how to pay online.

As Kate Marsden, CMO at Yaspa tells RBI: “This year’s findings reveal a surprising decline in awareness and highlight the urgent need for greater clarity and consistency across the industry.”

Further information on accessing the report is available via this link.

Kate Marsden discusses the findings of the Yaspa Index with RBI editor Douglas Blakey

Says Marsden: “I joined the company five years ago and have been in tech a very, very long time, since the beginning of the internet, basically. I’ve seen lots of different tech trends come and go.

“So, we have this payment solution based on open banking and it didn’t really have a name. We call it either open banking payments or instant bank payments. When we were getting into the nitty gritty of understanding what exactly needed to be on that button that you were putting in front of a consumer in a payment palette or in a checkout to encourage them to click, particularly when they didn’t know the name Yaspa, how did you describe what was going to happen? To get them to choose our brand [and not] cards, for example, or an e-wallet or PayPal?

“What you don’t want to be doing is using a merchant to test your conversion, to test your language. So, leading up to last year and the first time we did the index, I wanted to really understand the language that we were using to describe this payment method and what the industry was doing and how UK consumers really understood it. So this has not really been a piece of research into people’s usage of open banking, which we know is growing, or indeed their particular understanding of the technology. It’s about their familiarity with the term pay by bank, specifically because that is what the industry tends to be coalescing towards.

“But even this morning, I was still looking at a bunch of other checkouts and there are still lots of different phrases in use, including instant bank payments or pay by a bank account.

Pay by Bank – sharp drop in name awareness in past 12 months

Last year, when we did this test and we asked the key question about familiarity with the term Pay by Bank, 55% said they were familiar with it. 55% being familiar with Pay by Bank was actually surprisingly high. So last year was a surprise in that context.

“As we’ve seen, usage and take up continued to grow throughout 2025 we would expect familiarity to have increased.

But actually, this year it has fallen to 38%. It has fallen pretty dramatically.”

Marsden stresses that this is no reflection on the technology or the take up, but simply shows, that the industry has not been able to articulate and communicate the payment method so many are trying to promote.

“It feels like a real wake up call for both us and our competitors and all the other third-party payment providers in this space that we would really benefit from having a more concerted and united front on this area. And the consumer will absolutely benefit from that as well.

“To be honest, I don’t think it’s the best term at all. It’s so generic that it actually opens as many questions as it closes down. But in one respect, actually, it doesn’t really matter what that term is. If you put sufficient clout behind it and identity and understanding, you can make any term work to a certain extent. It doesn’t really matter. But actually, I think it could be better. I’m usually not in favour of creating names and brands just for the sake of it. I’d like to keep things really clear and transparent and simple and certainly that’s what we’ve done with all our product names. But this is one area where actually Pay by Bank is a sort of generic and unclear term. Obviously, your payments electronically are made by bank. It doesn’t really convey the benefits in terms of speed and security. It’s just about the technology, and it’s not a distinct enough technology from methods that maybe people are completely familiar with. I just think we have an opportunity here to do it a bit better, which would work for everybody.”

The aim of the index is ambitious, but as Marsden points out, nobody else is doing it.

“I’d be super happy to work with other TPPs and industry bodies in terms of increasing the investment and the work we do in consumer research. We work mostly in regulated sectors where that understanding of consumer identity and financial health is really important.

“Maybe the horse has already bolted, and we’re already too far down into the Pay by Bank world to change that. But in that case, let’s all move forward with Pay by Bank. And there’s still a huge amount of diversity and different terms being used, and that just doesn’t do anybody a great service.